Good humour takes proper setup and precise timing: Leading up to and delivering a punchline is an art form of its own which is harder to master than most people tend to believe. Yet it is one of the most important skills that separates the amateur jokester from the true comedian. Of course this is also what makes or brakes any video game that tries to make its audience laugh and it is especially the adventure game genre that has a tradition of delivering prime examples to both the best and the worst in comedy. One of the former is Alias 'The Magpie', a piece of interactive fiction telling the story of a hilarious art heist in a masterful way.
Something's not working right in Discworld. The repercussions can be seen all over. People are still dying as normal, but their souls aren't being taken away. So the dead continue to roam the streets. The mages guild decides to have Rincewind investigate the wereabouts of Death. After taking a couple of twists and turns, the plot has Death turning into a movie star and Rincewind temporarily taking over the reaper role.
To those who were mourning the death of the Adventure genre as they knew it in the middle of the 1990s, when Myst style games were taking over the market and purely plot-driven "games" hadn't yet found their niche, Discworld II was a revelation. Here was a game which had something akin to a plot, real characters and dialogue while offering puzzles which did not come straight out of a brainteaser book, detached from the world, but which originated from this world and the needs of moving the plot forward.
Mutiny of the Things for sure made me curious of what's inside, as it hardly provides any hint of what it will be. Things can, by definition, not be alive or even stage a mutiny. The intro, styled as a newspaper interview, tells me of our hero (Jack Flash) who plans to use his so-called Succ-O-Matic to literally suck the life out of these animated things again.
Though let's start from the beginning. A certain Prof. Dr. Eng. E. Eddison – also going by Evil Eddie – a mad scientist, has put life into everyday utilities when experimenting with energy generators: shoes, false teeth, pressing iron, pencils, snowmen, but also pumpkins, carrots, sunflowers and much more. All these things now want to found their independent city in the middle of this beautiful country. On a government mission, it is now Jack Flash's task to contain this out of control horde and destroy the energy generator in each level, which they need to survive. If everything else fails, he can also dissolve aggressive things into a cloud of ones. You may ask, why do they dissolve into ones? I assume this is an allusion to the digital origin of the objects, a kind of rematerialisation into zeros and ones. They went for a child-like motif. So there could be no blood or explosions. Which is why we get ones. In general, the graphical presentation is rather playful, almost cute and should appeal to kids. A couple of simple music tracks accompanying the entertaining jumping and running do the rest. However, each track is fairly short and therefore the melody will dig its way even into ears trained by screaming children until you won't be able to get rid of it anymore. Unfortunately, there is no way to individually control music and sound effects so that you will finally have no other option than to disable sound completely.
