Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?
Damon L. Wakes
Hey, I’ve played the other two games in this series! I enjoyed the very first game (“Who Shot Gum E. Bear”) to a point, but felt disconnected at the end, where the mystery turned out to be a joke instead of an actual ‘mystery solution’:
The next year, this was my reaction to “Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?”:
Reader, I was wrong: this is the game I had thought I was playing lo these ages past. Game #2 took itself seriously, but the game was largely ‘find clues in a warehouse’. This game basically went down my muder-mystery check-list, item for item (only missing one, which I will not reveal): ‘interviewing people, collecting clues, analyzing them, checking for alibi discrepancies, getting attacked by a goon and managing to escape’. I almost feel like Mr. Wakes literally had my list up in one window when designing his game in another.
That makes this a much more ambitious game than either of its predecessors, and the sheer weight of it all was almost too much. Personally, I often felt adrift in the game, not sure what I was supposed to be doing next. I often then found something helpful to do anyway, but I definitely more often felt like a lost puppy than a hardboiled detective. In the end, I had to rely on hints a little more heavily than I would have liked. But! I still figured some things out on my own, and the process of discovery (and the backstory of the murder you eventually solve) was satisfying. My only wish was for some sort of to-do list for myself that often appears in these types of games; I feel like I would have been on track more, and felt more in-character even if I was floundering a bit in reality. I also felt like the two-hour limit chafed a bit; it seemed like the sort of game that would play better if you gave it a little more room to breathe, going away and coming back with an idea.
But complaining seems churlish for a game that seems like it was written literally for me, personally. And I liked it a lot! I liked the atmosphere, I liked the cut-scene (he said vaguely), I liked the expanded Sugar City Lore, and I liked the final solution to the mystery, as well as its conclusion. The game was also well fleshed-out, with a lot of content almost everywhere.
But I did want the verb ‘chew’ to be a synonym for ‘lick’ instead of ‘eat’.
Did the author have anything to say? Yes! A solid murder mystery within an utterly ludicrous world that never batted an eye to let on that it knew it was ludicrous.
Did I have anything to do? Yes, quite a lot! So much so that I felt a bit adrift at times, but that did mean that it felt all the more satisfying when I figured something out (like stopping the motorcycle, which deserves a special call-out as ‘a thing that could happen only in Sugar City’) on my own.