Mean Mother Trucker by Bitter Karella
Compared to the other Bitter Karella games I’ve played – Basilica de Sangre, Poppet, Lovely Assistant: Magical Girl (about which, I remember with sudden shame, I still have to write a sonnet, which I hereby solemnly promise to do very very soon) – anyway, compared with those IF Comp games, Mean Mother Trucker is fairly short. It’s a simple, heavily-hinted puzzle game that takes perhaps thirty minutes to play through.
Perhaps the most obvious of Karella’s strengths is coming up with fresh new settings for every game; not just fresh compared to their other games, but fresh compared to the interactive fiction corpus as a whole. This time we are playing a transgender female trucker in an American desert town, complete with an arrogant cop, a born-again biker gang and a ‘lot lizard’, which I had to google but which turned out to be a nickname for a prostitute working the truck stops. The only piece of IF with even vaguely similar setting that comes to mind is I-0, but this game is nothing like that.
Our protagonist wants to convince a waitress to come with her on a dangerous trip. The plot, insofar as it exists, is pretty nonsensical. But the puzzles, oh man, the puzzles are a glorious indulging in the most paradigmatic sins of adventure game puzzle design. I’ve seen some reviewers complain about this; about, e.g., that absurd sequence of actions needed to wake up the dog. But I firmly believe that this is precisely the point! The spatula, the… oh man. And then to get into that garage (without any reason) and find a bobblehead of a Catholic saint. I loved it. Or the logic-defying puzzle with the gumball; simply brilliant. And still they’re easy to the point that you breeze through the game! This is an author who knows how to craft good puzzles (as we have seen in previous games) and who has purposefully thrown that skill out of the window in order to enjoy, for once, the kind of excess that would appeal to a Mean Mother Trucker.
As others have remarked, the game could do with an extra round of polish (there are some typos, missing synonyms, strange messages). But I found it easy to enjoy.