I honestly think “Hobbiton Recall” is a good title choice. A mashup between dissimilar genres. It’s the sort of title which might have been imagined during a fever dream, much like the one the PC has woken from in the opening scene. Saner minds would have scrapped the title the next morning, but JD Bardi followed through and developed a lengthy game around it.
The title drew me in. But when I began playing, I was put off by the relentless characterization of the PC as a misogynist jerk. Other reviewers have chronicled examples from every chapter reinforcing this characterization. As much as I enjoy GrueScript games (due to my affections for Robin Johnson’s early work) “Hobbiton Recall” is not a Robin Johnson game.
Playing a little further, I’m pretty confident that the dysfunctional relationship between the PC and his wife Mavis is a direct parody of some specific book or short story. Just not sure which one. The game has many direct or implied references to last century British literature. The space under the stairs and the breakfast scene felt distinctly like Harry Potter. The Toothpaste factory and later the little children working at the Rekall institute for “99.9999% less than adults” recalled specific scenes from Willy Wonka (Roald Dahl). The late chapters of “Hobbiton Recall” reference scenes from “The Hobbit” (Tolkein) and “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” (Phillip K Dick story which inspired Total Recall).
If you haven’t yet started the game, but you’ve read this far in the review, our protagonist dreams of becoming a Hobbit having adventures like those in Tolkeins books. He learns about an institute “Rekall” which can make dreams come true in the Virtual Reality world. But first he must solve an unrelated puzzle by delivering his wife’s urinalysis sample to the lab.
About half hour in I started following the walk-through very closely. The main puzzles prior to entry into Rekall are gauntlet-like, one item needed to get another, without much natural motivation about why you would do something like….
Playing bagpipes for a cat… filling your wife’s urinalysis bottle with pond water.
The most satisfying part of the story comes near the midgame where the asshole protagonist is
tied naked to a chair in a doctor’s office and injected with a hypodermic needle through his forehead.
The scene leading up to that is also one of the funniest dialogue sequences of the game.
Then suddenly, at the end of Act 1, the walk through file suddenly ends. I could see in the raw HTML text that I wasn’t even half way through the game, but there were no more walk through notes. I continued to play, consulting the raw HTML code for hints. The code is well organized and easy to read. Some reviewers have reported the hospital scene was impassable prior to a Sept 8 comp version update. I’m here to report that I went beyond the hospital scene, played for another two hours, and STILL haven’t reached the winning ending (but I think I’m close, and I’ve already spoiled it for myself by reading the code). The writing and characterization are a little less cringy in the second half (Mavis reappears briefly. I doubt very much this marriage can be saved). Some of the scenes, especially those parodying the Hobbit are quite funny. The puzzles beyond the first act are generally more intuitive and less tedious.
Well, there is one puzzle where you have to broker a romance between two elves by running messages back and forth between the two. But that was tedious in a fun way
I predict this game will have a high standard deviation, and may even be a contender for the Banana award.