“The Penal Zone”—tee hee—is the first installment of “The Devil’s Playhouse,” a point-and-click exploration game continuing the adventures of protagonist Sam, a pudgy canine PI and Max, a wise-cracking rabbit with newfound psychic abilities. The duo’s task is to prevent the James Earl Jones–sounding alien invader General Skun’ka’pe from taking over the planet. As you find out in the incredibly long intro/demo/tutorial—which takes something like 20 minutes and doesn’t save until you finish it—this involves interacting with a disembodied brain and obtaining various supernatural abilities for Max, including the power to look like an inanimate object.
I really wanted to finish this episode before reviewing it, but I honestly thought I might die of frustration first. It’s true exploration games aren’t my favorite—and that playing the game on a system with integrated graphics, such as my brand-new MacBook, isn’t recommended, but the game is unforgivably slow. You cannot combine slow gameplay with slow game performance. It’s deadly dull, unless you really enjoy the witty character banter. Other than that, it’s just a whole lot of looking around for unidentified items to solve obscure puzzles which, as Sam says, are “probably clever but overly complicated.”
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I love this game. It is the bee’s knees. Or the bomb. What’s wrong with you?
I’m a girl.