Vidiot Game continually puts you in strange situations you’ll need to navigate to survive. Will dancing for the rusty syringe save you?
Something triggered my memory of this surreal, delightful Xbox Live Indie Game lately, and luckily, it’s still available on Steam. In this game, you choose from an array of mushroom, potato, frying pan people to be your avatar as you play through several quick Warioware-like minigames where you need to run or move in order to avoid incoming dangers or make it to a finish line in time. That makes it sound fairly plain on paper, but its the bizarre locations and actions that make every minigame fun. Hurtling down a snowy hill is much more appealing when you’re evading a pixelated abyss instead of a monster.
This unpredictability is what I keep coming back to this game for. While the events are fairly similar (jumping over stuff, running around obstacles), the framework and reasoning is always silly and keeps getting sillier. Also, those active events aren’t the only things you’ll be doing, as there are many narrative events where you have to make a decision. Do you kidnap bigfoot? Snack on that cheeseburger you just found on the ground? Hassle genies? It’s hard to predict what consequences will come of your actions. They’re usually ones, though, as, like McPixel 3, the game’s silly deaths feel just as rewarding as getting it right. And even if you die, it’s not like the game REALLY feels like it’s starting over.
Vidiot Game is a wonderful game to put on if you just want to let some absurd humor wash over you for a little while. It does a great job of constantly surprising you with what will happen next, shifting from playing scratch games for horse apples to flying down corridors in space as a mushroom. It’s visual effects can be hard on the eyes the further you get into it (it’s as if the game is breaking down under its own strange behavior), but otherwise it has a lot of charm if you enjoy the unexpected and the weird.
Vidiot Game is available now (for free) on Steam.
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