Dude, Where Is My Beer? is a point and click aventure in which you play a middle aged man who just wants to drink a normal pilsner. At the beginning of the game you arrive in Oslo per bus and want to use your beak time to get a cold beer. But it gets clear relatively quickly that everyone in this damn city is young and hip and drinks fancy craft beers. At first that sounds like a fun game, but is it? (tl;dr I don’t think so)
It’s a relatively short game that (obviously) focuses on its humor. But there are two major flaws with this game:
First: The humor. This game makes fun of hipster tropes and the culture of different kinds of bars. I thought I would like that. But after only 15 minutes I thought it was just annoying. It just feels like it’s just the same joke on repeat over and over and over. You get in a bar, you ask for a pilsner, the bartender says you are old and unhip and offers you beers the wildest of names. There are multiple different bars that represent different tropes of drinking culture. A sports bar, a bar with some pub quiz going on, … It feels like all forms of this joke has already been told before the game was released. It got dull way to early for the game to be fun.
Second: Speaking of fun, let’s get to the gameplay. It’s a point and click, a genre notorious for it’s weird puzzles that reach to the point of being basically unsolvable without just mindlessley just clicking everything. And for me, this game is just this. I played on normal difficulty where it is possible to get some hints. But those hints are often missing if you are already in the middle of a puzzle without knowing. Or the hint is “just explore more”. And this is the most frustrating thing about this game. In most adventures when you solve a puzzle you get some kind of clue or item which leads to the next puzzle. That’s barely the case in this game. Lete give you an example: A woman needs a pen. So you try to find a pen. Some puzzle solving later you give her the pen and what happens? She just starts a phone call. That’s it. No reward, no real interaction, nothing. So what are you doing next? Explore the whole map again and see if something changed. The game is too often completely unresonsive to your actions, I found it rather frustrating. At some point I just opened the guide if it took too long to find out what I have to do next.
That’s my review/rant about Dude, Where Is My Beer? Has anyone else played it and a similar experience? Or do you disagree with me? And what is your favorite beer?
Ah, and before I forget, the positive things about this game: The soundtrack was okay, I guess? It did not get annoying in 4,5h of playtime? Also,… nah, I think that’s it.
