OHSGC: The Baconing

One Hour Steam Game Challenge! In which I try to play at least one hour of every game I own on Steam, since Valve torments us all by giving us such great deals on games we can't help but buy them regardless of whether we actually want them or have even heard of them. My goal is to get my Steam list to 100% played. 

The Baconing (66 min.) - I think I got this game from a Christmas Sale and I recall buying it because the whole set of games looked hilarious.

Worst. Game. Ever. First of all, I am 100% sure that I should have been playing this game with a controller. Do not, under any circumstances, play this game with mouse and keyboard. It is a horrendous port. However, by the time I realized I hated the controls so much because it's suppose to be played with a controller, I already came to hate the game in its entirety too much to actually reach up and plug one in. The game eventually just told me to give up on trying to play like a normal person:

Though to be fair, the super easy mode didn't seem super easy. Of course, that could be a combination of me not playing with a controller, not even a little bit understanding how to operate the shield correctly, and spending most of the game trying to figure out the weapon quirks.


Some of the jokes are actually funny and cleverly done but most of the humor in the game reads like, "Oh! Kids on the internet think bacon is funny! Let's say the word bacon a lot!" There is no tutorial--random hints pop up in the middle of your screen at really awkward moments or when you are clicking around at the menu options trying to figure shit out. There's also an abundance of pointless game mechanics like "fortune cookies" that supposedly give you hints for your quests, but which the game forces you to use to even move on occasionally. 


Probably the worst game mechanic is that if you accidentally interact with something near baddies and the baddies happen to see you after a time, they will start attacking you...while you are in conversation window...which you can't exit out of until the conversation is over. This cow got me killed in that fashion! I went to interact with it and I didn't see some baddies around the corner. Mid-conversation they ran out and attacked me and I had to speed click through whatever that cow was suppose to be telling me so that I could fight back. 

In the end, the only thing I liked about The Baconing was the art/style. I think they must have put a massive amount more effort into perfecting the style of every bit of this game than they did in the actual game part of the game.



Play again? Extremely unlikely. The only circumstance under which I would play this game again is if Beau and I plugged in two controllers and played together so that we could at least get some entertainment value out of making fun of it. 




Side note: I just figured out that I know Hothead Games from them making the first two Penny Arcade Adventures. As much as I love all things Penny Arcade, those games had terrible mechanics but really fun graphics as well! Of course the biggest saving grace for them is that Jerry Holkins wrote the script and jokes. I have heard that the third game, which was developed by a different studio, is infinitely better.