Eat the Eldritch by Olaf Nowacki
This game is interestingly similar to Assembly. Both feature Old Gods and weird cultists who are summoning them, and both combine this with a very mundane setting and a main character who just does fairly mundane things. Assembly is brilliant in its use of IKEA instructions as a metaphor for both ritual and puzzle, and its best puzzles are better then those of Nowacki’s game. But Eat the Eldritch is funnier, and perhaps, in the end, that gives it a slight edge for me. (I’ll score them exactly the same, I think, so we’re talking minor differences.)
Eat the Eldritch plays it so cool. As a player, you recognise extremely soon that you’re in a Lovecraftian horror scenario, while the protagonist remains completely oblivious, obsessed with getting a good meal while evidence of the occult piles up around him. Then we literally bump into Cthulhu. But, and this is the brilliant part, the game does not switch to real Lovecraftian horror. We just double down on the idea that we’re a captain of a fishing vessel and our only concern is to get fish sticks. And so we turn Cthulhu into frozen packages that will bring joy to kids all over the world. And our cultist shipmates happily join us. For all we know, the company brought them on board with this exact scenario in mind.
With good writing, a great comedic scenario, and solid puzzles, Eat the Eldritch was a delight. The only thing I didn’t like as much was the dream sequence. It seemed the only thing that didn’t fit the keeping-it-mundane style of the rest of the work, and also involved the only illogical puzzle (which I didn’t manage to solve, precisely because it didn’t fit the tone of the game).