for PC through Steam on May 21th, 2015.The game's protagonist is Warren, an indie game developer who had just completed his first game. Unfortunately, his hard drive just gave out, his back-up drive was in his car that just got towed away, and his publishing license will expire tomorrow. Will he be able to publish his game by the end of the night, or is he doomed?
Tropes used in this game:
- Advancing Wall of Doom: Warren's attempt to upload his source hack is represented by a cyberpony running away from a fail state wall, while having to dodge the obstacles in its path.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Invoked; Warren decides he needs to go through his air vent after the door got jammed, and sets about unscrewing the vent's cover. Once he does that, however, it turns out the door was in fact fine the whole time.
- Butt-Monkey: Warren. See Humiliation Conga entry.
- Cat Girl: The self-aware firewall guarding the data of Idio Baka's game is rendered as an anime girl with purple hair and cat ears.
- Dialogue Tree: The final game's hack is done remotely, but it requires getting through a seemingly self-aware firewall. Doing so requires correct answers to multiple choices questions written in this manner.
- Energy Ball: The blue unicorn-like gally in "Gally 3" fires blue orbs from its horn.
- Gameplay Roulette: While the "core" gameplay is to walk around and interact with things, it takes up at most half of the runtime. The other half is source-hacking five games from fellow developers in your block, which requires playing them yourself, and experiencing their vastly different gameplays, fist.
- Goggles Do Nothing: The ponies in the pseudo-MLP fanfic game, "Gallies", all have goggles placed uselessly over their forehead.
- Gratuitous French: The ending screen of "The Return" consists entirely of badly written French.
- Humiliation Conga: First, Warren's computer breaks down in the prologue. He has a back-up drive in his car but he can't get down because the door is jammed, so he unscrews the vent, only to find out it actually wasn't. He gets down, and finds out his car just got towed. Once it's brought back, he realizes he didn't bring keys with him and runs back to the apartment...only for the tow guy Cabe to smash the window in anyway. He gets the hard drive...and finds out it got formatted...and so is reduced to source-hacking the games made by his neighbours.
- Locked Door:
- The door of Warren's office had mysteriously gotten jammed, which forces him to go around through an air vent. Once he unscrews the vent's cover, however, the door opens by itself: it turns out he just needed to pull at the knob, not push it.
- In "The Return", all but one of the doors are also locked.
- Nocturnal Emission: "Super Heart Rate Simulator's" final challenge is keeping its protagonist, Stick, from having a heart attack while he's having an erotic dream. A success means that he wakes up with sticky pants, but is at least alive.
- Playable Epilogue: You get to play Warren's rom hack game as the credits roll.
- Punny Name: The developer who has apparently managed to create a self-aware firewall, Idio Baka, is essentially meant to have his name come across as "Crazy Idiot".
- Shout-Out:
- One character, "Brohoof19", is a huge fan of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the game Warren hacks from him is a fanfic one, and is actually the most conventionally playable out of all four. The epilogue, however, says that he gave up on it after "learning that magic ponies do not exist", and instead moved to noodly characters from "mental time".
- Warren's bookshelf is apparently full of dystopic sci-fi novels like batshit max and bestworld. This is referenced again in the ending, where it's revealed he used the funds from his hacked game to create a dystopian sci-fi game "Big Brother", which became an award-winning hit.
- Then, there's David Beige, a pretty clear Expy of Quantic Dream head David Cage. The game he supposedly made, "The Return", requires the player's input even for tiny actions, much like in Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, and Warren's take on it echoes the common criticisms of those games, such the lack of legitimate puzzles and problem-solving, yet also the fans hailing the games as masterpieces and treating those who disagree very aggressively.
- Show Within a Show: The five games from fellow developers that Warren tries source-hacking together to avoid disaster.
- Spikes of Doom: "You have to Press UP to Jump" has bright green triangles representing insta-kill spikes.
- Stylistic Suck: The main game's 3D graphics would have been awful even in the dawn of the era, and are far worse than the default textures that come available with all the modern 3D engines, being at best comparable to Thirty Flights of Loving. Here, it's used to establish commonality with the low-budget mobile games the protagonist is romhacking.
- Timed Mission: The first game Warren ends up source-hacking, "Super Heart Rate Simulator" consists of controlling the protagonist's heartbeat through clicking on the heart icon at the correct time during the timed stretches where he is doing (or not doing) various activities with different impact on his heart rate.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The premise of "The Return", a game by David Beige.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The game ends with such an epilogue, which is narrated by Idio Baka's firewall, and tells the tale of all the characters seen or mentioned in the game.
