Where They Cremate The Roadkill Reviews

This has already been mentioned previously, but this is the third game in a series. The first game is Middens, and the prequel, Gingiva, comes after. Watching the art style of the games shift over time has been a big treat. I was enraptured by Middens and it remains my favorite game out of this series, but this one is a close second. Once I got accustomed to the controls and menu I greatly enjoyed the experience this offered, and every time I play one of these games I feel like I learn something new to love about each. To the creator, I hope you make more games along this plotline, I can't wait to see what you put out next!

That was amazing! This game is truly unique and it challenges the player in many ways. This is like nothing I will ever play again, I'm sure of it. Although it was very abstract and experimental, it worked, and this game became very addicting. The artwork, animation, music and atmosphere are sublime and the NPC character sprites are excellent. Creativity simply oozes out of this game. I feel I've developed a nostalgia for this game, already, even though I've just completed it. I'm certain I will come back and replay it in the near future. 10/10 game.

More of an experience than a game, an unique experience that cant be explained with words, more than worth the pennies it costs.

Where do I begin - I've just recently finished this game. It's been in my library for a good time now but I just got around to finishing it with two endings (one being the dead end ending) I got this as soon as I could as soon as it was released because I have played the creator's previous games Gingiva and Middens. I was not disappointed - quite the opposite. If you are familliar with the two aformentioned, it's a bit of a step in an experimental direction as far as gameplay goes as it is a beatemup. It takes a little getting used to but it isn't widely difficult to. This is a review, though, and I'm obliged to tell of the pitfalls despite the much love that I have for this game, so I will get them out of the way. Though the controls are simple, they are a little clunky. The abstract nature of the game makes for compromised level design (bad for gameplay, great for artistic environment which is a fair tradeoff that the game intentionally pulls off) and attributes to a rather general lack of direction - you need some measure of patience to progress in this game because there is simply so much hidden in the environments, and aside from the base mechanics not much is conveyed in terms of where to go and what to do etc, there are mechanics i began discovering near the end of my playthrough - however this doubly serves to a part of it's beauty. As a videogame it may fall short in some standards such as this, but I'll get into why they are superceded. Aside that, the next biggest fundamental flaw is a prevalence of minor glitches. Bottom line - the gameplay and how it progresses is fairly unique and takes some getting used to (it is IMPARITIVE that you are always thinking outside the box and scanning the screen), but once you get the feel of things you'll be progressing through the game like a breeze - don't let the review intimidate you, this is an exploration game with a driving narrative, beautiful art and enjoyable gameplay, if that sounds like something you'd be in to then definitely consider picking up a copy. It can be easy to become lost in some segments of the world and your first time around you're not going to know what much to do, and could be wandering for minutes before getting that one click that drives everything forward - this is a curse in the effect that it is a drawback of the gameplay but a blessing in the nature of the narrative it provides, the lost in a strange world is imparitive to the feel of the game but it does admittedly get slightly unfair at times. Now on to why I love this game; The reasons why the gameplay may come up short at first is because this is less of a game and more of an immersive interactive painting - the term animated painting comes to mind. I can think of describing the artistic direction as nothing other than brilliant - each room, each environment is it's very own, with it's own tone and feel. As the description states, each environment is hand drawn with almost no reused assets, and the art styles range from a child's coloring book to bold collagist styles, populated by unique creatures all with some manner of interesting dialogue with roots in occult and philosophical themes. To accent this, the sound track is down right perfect for it - every room is harmonized in it's beautiful weirdness, the sound design so well executed to a point of immersion that still haunts me as I write this review. I mentioned the tradeoff of level design for a more artistic environment - in this light, you can see that as a compliment, and in that vein, I can say that the level design is great for a game of it's nature as opposed to the usual beatemup. My biggest gripe is that in several rooms there's just not enough room to move around while fighting and can lead to attacking npcs you don't want to attack. You play as a renevant charged with hunting down those that made your life hell - at the mercy of not spoiling any events that I encourage you play for yourself to experience, there's not much I can say beyond that aside from that it's easy to forget that as you play, being put in different perspectives and past lives. If you die - you die, and go to an afterlife, then back to a main menu. The concept of actually experiencing an afterlife in a game is not one I can think of being in any other in the way it's presented here. The entire game is a rollercoaster of being thrown into different perspectives and being motivated to uphold your vengeance by a devil figure and a sentient smartphone. The sheer amount of work that was put into this game seems unfathomable, the amount of artistry it possesses seems unreal - a review could not do it proper justice, I urge anyone who's piqued interest and the game, from the game or this review, to buy it and play it for yourself - there is so much to be appreciated about this game. I cannot stress that enough. In a time where modern art is so easily characterized and in fact accepted by the corners it cuts, this game stands out as a shining example to them all. This game is akin to an "age of mystery" experience akin to playing a nostalgic adventure game in front of your TV at age 7 or something of the sort, an entirely unique experience not unlike that of soul searching. I would consider Where They Cremate The Roadkill to be one of the best faces of surreal and avant-garde in the best and most substantial way possible. I could reccomend this game day and night to you, but you won't know why I'm reccomending it so vehemently until you play it and see for yourself.

I do not know anything nefarious about the creator so I can't speak on it. I have checked out his other games which were more or less advanced rpg maker games. I have not put a lot of time into this as of yet especially since the game play is somewhat slow and odd. The visuals are cool weird and abrasive. Its most like an adventure game in scope with a healthly dash of off the scale bizaaro type events . I found this and a few others when I was looking up strange games. Its an experience and I think if you are on the adventurous side give it a go. I will say its not for everyone and sometimes I think I don't know who this was made for but its an experience that deserves a try!

Where They Cremate The Roadkill is like a modern art museum with a floor covered in a think layer of tar. The clunky gameplay is an absolute chore to wade through, but it's a chore with rewards, that is of course, if you like the bitter-nutty taste of surreal art and philosophical quips. Artistically this game is fantastic. I adore the mind shattering dialog, the distinct visual styles of each area, and the enchanting atmosphere the soundtrack creates. The story, while somewhat incoherent, is an interesting look at the struggles of the self vs the world. It's a beautiful game with some intense things to say about life. Unfortunately this game is held back by one of it's biggest components, the gameplay. Enemies are damage sponges with poorly telegraphed, and sometimes unfair attacks. Movement feels unnatural, slow, and stiff. And sometimes getting from one area to the next can be needlessly cryptic. While I personally love this game for what it does right, it has some very overbearing flaws, and very acquired tastes, that prevent me from recommending it to everyone. I still highly recommend it to the niche group of people that might enjoy it, but you really need to consider both, how much you like surrealism, and how much bad game design you're willing to put up with, to know if you're a part of that niche.

I entered this game having played its two prequels, eager for another abstract RPG. Gingiva, the second in the trilogy, unexpectedly became one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I expected this game to be comparable hidden gem, only to slog through a broken, incomprehensible fever dream. One of this game's omnipotent flaws is the controls. WTCTR boasts the most unconventional, uncomfortable and convoluted set of controls I've ever experienced. Even after remapping everything to a controller, I still fumbled through my playing experience. "Point-&-Click Adventure" elements are shoved in through additional mouse controls, adding further complication. While the game expects you to discover secrets through clicking on suspicious areas, the interaction hitboxes on those areas are miniscule and disjointed from the object. This leads to the entire concept devolving into blindly clicking on every notable piece of scenery trying to stumble into a secret. The menus themselves can be difficult to navigate due to the lack of proper labels outside of the game's manual. You'll find yourself navigating through a labyrinth of submenus within submenus, most of which serving seemingly little to no purpose. WTCTR attempts to make itself stand out from its turn-based contemporaries by attempting to be a real-time open world action game. This is quite possibly the decision that singlehandedly ruins the game for me. Combat never evolves from button mashing, whether it be with your normal attack, your skills or your items. Most weapons are hardly distinguishable from the others. A good majority of the special attacks seem to be broken and unusable. A good majority of the game's items are completely useless. Skills are acquired at what feels like random, with only a handful being useful. The game attempts to introduce an elemental weakness system, summarized by enemies being weak to attacks of the color they appear as. However, nowhere in the game can you learn which elemental damage types your various attacks deal, making the entire system essentially irrelevant. Enemies are HP sponges with multiple seconds of invincibility frames after each hit. They deal damage mostly through contact damage, occasionally using indiscernible skills at random. NPCs are capable of defeating you without warning, whether it be through bypassing your invincibility frames, inflicting lethal status effects, or just by you interacting with them in the wrong way. The constant risk of death during any interaction is cemented by each Game Over sending you back to the title screen, forcing you to reload a previous save file. This results in having to save the game after every encounter to minimize the potential of lost progress. The game attempts an Afterlife area similar to Hylics. yet doesn't allow the player to retain their progress. This is despite the entire narrative revolving around the protagonist being denied entry to said afterlife due to unfulfilled potential. The plot itself is hardly comprehensible and is never developed. Every cutscene is nothing but a numbing monologue trying to hammer in the feeling of pessimism and nihilism. Every NPC serves no purpose but to regurgitate a philisophical word salad that further enforces these nihilistic ideals. Nothing feels like it has any significance to the world around it. As a successor to Middens and Gingiva, WTCTR feels completely disconnected. The few locations that are connected to the previous games are optional and do nothing to expand on those predecessors. There are no returning characters aside from one hamfisted in at the very end. The few callbacks to this game's prequels are few, far between and minute. Even if you want an unconventional game with abstract visuals, do NOT buy WTCTR. There are many alternatives that are more fun, well written and completely free. Middens is a simplistic RPG with unique environments to explore and Gingiva is an interpretive narrative filled with memorable characters and dialogue. I bought this game out of love for the previous two titles, only to be let down by this disaster of a game. I couldn't even finish it due to a crash occurring every time a specific endgame NPC appeared on-screen. That alone should tell you not to spend money on this game. WTCTR is quite possibly the worst game I've ever played. Every minute of the 10 hours I spent playing it felt like a chore I was wading through just for the sake of it. I wasn't playing because it was fun or even out of curiosity. I endured this mess just to be able to lay it to rest. There's nothing here worth your time. Your playing experience won't improve at any point. Do not play this game.

TL:DR WTCtR features spelling/grammar errors, underdeveloped gameplay, and basic scripting errors that will genuinely break your game. It's not only a pile of half-realized ideas built over an rpgmaker engine, but even with a team on this project (contrasted to Clowder working alone on his previous games), there are basic errors where I can accidentally sequence break the entire game due to coincidentally going back to a previous point. If you like atmospheric games with a flair for stressed angles, shuddering walls, and surrealist mish-mashes of old pop-art collages, you may like this game, but you'd likely prefer Middens instead. It's free, more functional, and less railroaded. When I say functional, I don't just mean the 'gameplay', which usually takes a backseat in walking sims or 'art games', but not Where They Cremate the Roadkill. This game is tightly bound to vague schizo-conspiratorial-core plot: of cycles of characters being groomed into serving demons, or lesser gods, or aliens. These cycles occur in the past, present, and future; where creativity and mental connection is a Neo-platonic projection given off by psychic, self-shaping beings. This can sound cool, but it goes by quick and without explanation or development. It flies by in a David Cage-ish (specifically Omikron) sense, where it doesn't mean much beyond some cool imagery and call-outs to the Illuminati worms living inside every pill. This could all be fine if a player had some breathing room. One could non-narratively or disjunctively explore a series of themes, but this implies there's a world to explore through these themes. There isn't. You are told there's a world and real cemeteries that fill with everyone you kill, but don't mistake this for an open-world game, or a game with decent pacing (between combat, exploration, and reprieve in towns). It isn't. The combat is smashing two keys and cycling between obtusely named items while getting hit until you pull out a middle finger and win. The plot and world are grandiose-seeming, but hollow. You are given aesthetic devices (a tamagotchi and smartphone used to explain objectives and act as a manual) with awful UI that sequence breaks your game. You're given 'cool' explanations of an elemental system that namedrops astrology and eastern esoterica, with enemy colors aligning with Saturn's rectal-spot. It's all gish-gallop. (This section is written with one of Clowder's other games - Middens - in context) It seems the further Clowder games stray from the origin of Middens, the more nonsensical and less functional his games become in terms of gameplay, writing, and atmosphere. Middens was a maze taking place at a junction between broken worlds. It had a habit of inconsistent pathways that eased off the moment I lost patience. It was clever and euphoric. The take-turn combat allowed one enough time to push through its name-swapped elemental system (the combat tic-tac-toe all rpgs follow). You were a man with a talking gun. You could kill others or not, and aside from a few confrontations on your actions, the story was unobtrusive. WTCtR is the opposite.

[h1] Before You Buy [/h1] Before you buy this game, it's important to know that it has two other non-steam games that are "prequels" to this one. The games are Middens and Gingiva and are available for free on GameJolt. Although they are not necessary to play this game, a lot of the greater plot will be confusing without it. Another reason to play these games is they can act as a litmus test on whether or not you should get this game. If I could give this game a mixed review I would. Like its predecessors, it is largely exploratory in nature and is the second most linear game of the three. The ending conditions have you kill specific npcs scattered throughout the world and trigger certain events with an item during the final encounter. It takes a much different approach to combat from the other two games by having it be in real time rather than turn-based. [h1] Pros [/h1] This game has some of the unique art I've seen in any game and a decent soundtrack. The world it takes place in is very interesting and was built up well with environmental story-telling. The combat is better than the other games, but it has its own problems that I'll tackle later. The story revolves around themes of absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism at times. Essentially the world is failing, and finding meaning in living is either pointless or selfish. On the technical side, this game pushes rpgmaker to levels I didn't think were possible at times. A lot of the combat is fairly unique and interesting (if it worked half the time). [h1] Cons [/h1] Like the creator's other games, the best word I can use to describe the story at times is "pretentious". While it was somewhat acceptable in Middens and done fairly well in Gingiva, this game takes it to an extreme by trying to have the best of both exploratory and linear aspects of the prior games. It feels like you're being force-fed garbage half the time that has almost no relation to the plot being put forward. I wouldn't have taken issue with this if the game was not longer than BOTH games combined. A good 3 or 4 hours could have been cut out and it would have been a much better game without it. A classic case of trying to have your cake and eating it too. On the technical side, this game has HUGE problems. Several areas were prone to massive frame drops and crashing was a genuine issue throughout the game. I highly recommend saving constantly as there are seriously points where you can get several crashes in a row. The combat while interesting, is ruined by terrible, and unchangeable, keybinds. Because of the performance issues inputs felt slow to respond and caused many deaths. Overall, everything in the game can be cheesed quite easily with proper use of items and abilities, allowing you to avoid further frustration. I only gave this a recommendation for people who like these types of games. If you're reading this, you'll more than likely have played games similar to it. Outside of that, play Middens and Gingiva first for a feel. If you don't like them, I strongly recommend that you do not get this game.

A phantasmagorical treatment on the transmigration of a soul. The Buddhist Yamantaka swoops into the scene as the player assumes the body of a ghost orb traversing the realm of lesser lights. From there the player is wheeled into the placements of three conjunct creatures as they encounter a mysterious stranger. Your opponent is your future self whose rogue ego desires to possess the essence of all creation and its inhabitants in an inverted singularity. Like the demiurge of Gnosticism, it is a usurper god that wishes to replace each instance of individuality with itself. It has hitherto succeeded in absorbing everything but its past self and the story's focus: an alienated from everyone, mentally unstable, suicidal, jobless commoner(who hates others and especially hates the world). How can it absorb into itself what is diametrically opposed to itself? It can't and so it resorts to nudging the player into identifying with the world so they may be devoured. Like the Devil of classical Christianity, it manipulates towards this outcome through gifts, power and most of all; revenge. Gameplay blooms late as the game establishes its footing in a series of stylistically unique vignettes. Only by the third act does the extent of the environment become truly evident. In a throwback to early games, the difficulty is brutal at the onset. Players are encouraged to be conservative as imprudent violence can quickly escalate into a death sentence. Since most adversaries are passive until attacked the challenge is more psychological than literal. Menus are nearly entirely displayed in pictograms compounding the learning curve. Given the author's background in Surrealism and Dadaism and the game's many references to the Situationists this is most likely an ode to Lettrism. A French avant-grade movement Lettrism utilized "hypergraphics" in place of words to estrange communication from its controllers. Once learned, however, the player will quickly phase through the menus as if they were described in the words so commonplace in gaming. Nearly every portion of the game seems designed as an assault on the conventional. Shopkeepers offer "Abortions in a Bottle" for no small price, police are allied with satanic forces, the presidential building resides under a pyramid, talking worms are replacing vertebrates as the dominant life-form and student debt is an equipable item that will slowly devour your spirit. At no point did I feel I could predict what was next. Even among peculiar games this title is exceptionally strange. It is not only visually unusual it is unusual in all regards. This is not a game for casuals who will struggle to get through the first ten minutes let alone the game's 7+ hours. Rather I recommend this title to internet scholars of the RPG genre, students of comparative religion, metalheads, sexual offenders, freakshows, rocking sharks, the demon possessed, carnival operators, that quiet kid who will one day snap, revolutionaries, swine herders, folks who translate obscure NES titles into English over years or those who are fond of odd antiques.