Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2

It’s 2017 and the Apocalypse is years ahead of schedule and the gods have disappeared. You, a Deep One, have awoken from the Dreamland and must find the Necronomicon before Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos and his 7 gods does and restore things to how they were or bring in a new age. Alright, so SAT3: TST2 is the third VN in the series and it’s not nearly as cool as I made it sound in the paragraph above. This VN is, at its core, pure insanity and chaos. It’s a Lovecraftian adventure where you fight monsters by answering trivia questions (Brush up on your Shakespeare.) and fly around on a floating ship/city while “fighting” Microsoft paint horror monsters and creatures. One moment you’re in Antarctica making friends with a... yeti girl with pointy teeth (?) and the next you’re challenging Alexander Hamilton to a rap battle and signing the declaration of Independence. (Reminder: It’s 2017.) TL;DR: It’s pure insanity and I would only recommend it if you love fever dreams with a Lovecraftian touch; or if you read the other two VN’s in the series and liked them, which prompts the question, WHY? https://i.imgur.com/nxyEHm9.jpg

The good: Excellent sense of humor, clever characters, great writing. The game's "battles" are done through arguments and once you figure out the pattern they're not too challenging, and therein lies the fun. You feel so awesome and clever when you figure it out and get through fights flawlessly. There are tons of pop culture references, which are very good at inducing the "oh, I got that!" feeling of superior cultural awareness that a good episode of Mystery Science Theater 2k was so adept at creating. The bad: You will be retreading the same screens over and over as you move from one place to another, "fetch quests" are never very exciting but a menu-based-movement game laden with them introduces some measure of tedium. The ugly: There's a LOT of DLC, though the Black Goat edition fixes this problem, it's approaching Crusader Kings levels here. Unlike CK2 though, the DLC is very reasonably priced and I view many of them more as a way to tip a few bucks to the dev than essential upgrades. The sheer memetic and humor density treads a fine line that some people will no doubt find overly dense, though I personally find it charming. The sort of parodic rapid-fire of jokes…

"Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2" is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. On the matte…

So I bought this game following my experience with the first one which I found weird but entertaining. Sadly the followup feels tired and stretched thin. The humor is way less inspired, the use of "Cthulhu Mythos" elements felt irrelevant as art and story status of the beings are way less connected to their original counterparts than in the first one, the dialogue (combat) options felt more random and even more so like game of trivial pursuit than something related to the story or characters (though it was a problem to at some points in the first one). Small nick pick: for some reason (though not surprising after looking at this company's game library) there is an over abundance of Shakespeare references and I mean there are LOTS of them. Those should really have been references to Lovecraft and his circles of associates and friends The combat system is still great and interesting though, but like mentioned before it didn't feel like I was battling anybody through knowledge and logic but just answering trivia questions. There is also a lot of repetition. When you get a random encounter with something you already fought the answers are the same and in the same order and for so…

I just don't get it, which may actually be the point of the game. Just line after line of incoherrent gibberish. Probably would make more sense if I had played the original, but I have a strong feeling it wouldn't make a difference. I'm going to uninstall and move on.

I could not get this to run. It's a shame because I really enjoyed the first game in the series.