The haunted house has become a ripe location in which to set weird video games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Blue Prince, Botany Manor and Layers of Fear spring to mind. The manor as a site of danger, supernatural peril, untrustworthy architecture – perfect, surely, for an unsettling experience. Or even a silly experience in unsettling surroundings.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 promises much in its title. It presents initially as a high-concept dinosaur-hunting adventure in spooky house run by a sinister old mogul, then quickly reveals to the player that it knows it is a video game. A broken video game, that is, and it is up to us to patch it as we go.
The player explores the mansion through text and puzzle vignettes, pushing the limits on every scenario in the hopes of finding bugs and glitches, ultimately in the hope of defying the wishes of the unseen developers and “finishing” the game themself. This is a big concept, but the game seems to be interested in telling us its ideas rather than showing them to us – or demonstrating them within the play itself.
The combat system through which our butch, confused protagonist operates is a clever little game of match three, the rules of which bend and flex depending on what he is fighting. Sometimes it is a dinosaur with a gun. Sometimes it is a tripwire, sometimes it is a legion of clones – sometimes his own clone. Sometimes it is talking vegetables. Sometimes a dinosaur in a wig. The silliness is one note and becomes flat quickly, saved only by the pleasing nature of the puzzles.
Still, in order to have an effective game of match three – or, frankly, Candy Crush – you have to use high-contrast colours to make it kinder on the player. There were rounds when I played in which the symbols were really difficult to differentiate, which interrupted the otherwise pleasing flow. This visual issue is not limited to the puzzles: the entire colour palette of this game is muddy. It neither commits to the gothic nor leans full chaos.
The same issues applies to the text. The game is text based, but the dialogue and descriptive writing are as muddy as the visuals. The jokes are fine, though they aim to be subversive and shocking (dinosaur romance being a recurring gag). However, the game being about gameplay and game development means that much of the descriptions are couched in jargon. Discussions of files and version history are beyond inside baseball. So if you are a seasoned enough gamer to be up to speed with the meta language, surely you don’t need swearwords to be starred out. Surely we were all laughing at dinosaur romance five years ago. The writing is so close to great. It just needed to be sharper.
The art style is sketchy, but not in a way that evokes a deliberate aesthetic. There are times in which reality is said, by the text, to be bending and glitching. There are moments in which we disappear into voids and exit the world. There is even a somewhat climactic moment in which we enter the internet. Still, the visuals pull their punches. These strange occurrences can be evoked with drawings and don’t require flashy graphics. I recognise the illustrative style is deliberate but the game would have been better served by even a little more playfulness, or even intentionality, in the art style. Two moments did make me laugh – one involving some unexpected clowns, the other, pets – when the visual style actually did move into the meta and demonstrate some of what the game tells us it is about.
I wanted to love this game. On paper it is outrageous. Strange Scaffold, the developer, is known for the weird – notably Clickholding, which is sinister, experimental and truly queries what a game is in its execution (there is a lot of clicking, and being watched in the action of clicking). Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 certainly is creepy, and set in a mansion, and does have dinosaurs and some really satisfying puzzles. It also has some great ideas and isn’t quite a failed experiment. While it doesn’t bend reality in the way that it seems to want to, it aims high, and if the player can manage the places where the aesthetic falls short, they’ll have a great time. They might even meet a nice, blond dinosaur they can take home with them.
