Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata? (Damon L. Wakes)
Played on: 7th October
How I played it: Downloaded and run through Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 35mins, solved correctly with one hint
This year’s Bubble Gumshoe mystery is another one where I’m coming into it with no experience or knowledge of the previous entries in the series. So most references to previous games will be lost on me (although I did recognise Mayor McFreeze and Gum E. Bear’s names from previous ballots), and more importantly, so will be any improvements. I can say that Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata is a lot of fun in its own right - not too tough a nut to crack, but with tons of clever ideas and jokes.
This is a hardboiled noir mystery based around investigating a gruesome murder in the run-down industrial zone of a decaying city at the mercy of organised crime and drug trafficking. There is an investigative puzzler at the heart of this game, so you’re expected to interview witnesses and associates of the victim, maybe do a little light parser-puzzling to get into places you’re not supposed to be, and eventually bring the evidence to the guilty party and formally accuse them of the crime. And of course, like all good murder mysteries, the game is set in a world of candy, so the victim is a piñata, the drugs are sherbet and crystal candy, and it’s always raining syrup.[1]
In my last review, I was hard on A Day in a Hell Corp for overselling its jokes. Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata demonstrates why the opposite approach works so well for me. The narration seems almost unaware of the fact that the protagonist is a bubblegum woman and everything is made of sweets, so it plays all the gritty detective tropes absolutely straight. It’s so deadpan that it’s easy to miss the puns - it took me five passes to notice that one of the cars I was passing in a certain set-piece was a Volkswagenwheel. I’m sure I’m missing others – there’s a pun just about everywhere you look. It could be groanworthy, and often is, but there are so many puns tossed off so blithely that it won me over almost immediately. It helps that there are a lot of really good other jokes too. (The line of the game for me, and maybe the line of the Comp so far, is Jawbreaker the spherical heavy complaining about his bad luck at poker: “I can never seem to win - even when my cards are so good I get up and shout hooray.”)
I’m very tempted to just list all the jokes I liked and call it a review, but the actual game is pretty well constructed too. The fundamental mystery is not difficult – the critical evidence is pretty damning – but the way it unfolds has been nicely choreographed. The game’s cast of NPCs is very good, and care has been taken to give them all reasonable motives and/or connections to Jimmy Piñata so that the mystery is not completely trivial to solve. That certain set-piece mentioned above is perhaps the highlight, well-integrated into the game structurally – it’s always neat to reflect on the composition of a game and see how it pulled your strings to get you in the right place at the right time with the right information.
The puzzles have been pitched about right too, though some are a lot easier than others. The password puzzle, as trivial as it is, is a great example of how puzzles can be participatory jokes with their own punchlines. A central set-piece puzzle involving a motorbike was a struggle for me to figure out, but there are good enough nudges provided within the game to get me there, and the solution makes good use of the setting in a satisfyingly grisly way. There’s a sort-of riddle which may require a bit of knowledge of either bakery or pop-culture, which is perhaps a touch unfair to people who don’t have either but Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata does provide another method of getting the solution. (I solved it by the bakery route, and somehow managed to completely miss the pop-culture reference until like 10 minutes after the riddle, even though almost the whole game is- well, that would be spoilers, but I think more alert people than me will twig within the first few minutes.) The only puzzle I needed a hint for was getting into the boat, which I have a gripe about, though not a very strong gripe – the crucial step “lick taffy” would not have occurred to me in a long time, using as it does a verb that’s not very commonly used in IF (well, not by most people, anyway). But I fully accept that it makes sense in retrospect, and that it’s suggested by the setting in the same way as that bike puzzle is.
While I was getting that hint, I stopped to admire the walkthrough. I’m not sure, but I think it’s a whole separate Twine game which implements the solution as a set of Invisiclues hints. It’s really thoughtful work. I had a proper read-through after completing the game, and I’m hugely impressed by how much work has gone into planting red herrings, involving whole false puzzle trails, just to prevent the player lawn-mowering through all possible NPC accusations. There’s an alternate universe where I found one of these puzzle trails and fell hook line and sinker for it, and ended up writing a slightly saltier review here after making a false accusation. But in this universe where I got it right and didn’t even realise you could get into the church tower, I admire it.
Oh my god I just realised that he’s called Jimmy Piñata because it’s the same initials as Jesse Pinkman. And he’s a drug mule. Aaaaaagh. Anyway, very good game.
It’s 100% irrelevant to the review but every time I read this sentence back to myself I want to sing it like Martin Sheffield Lickly. ↩︎