Follow TV Tropes

Following

Video Game / Mondo Medicals

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/4r12uds_5966.png
Mondo Medicals is not responsible for any damage to your mental health.
Welcome to Mondo Medicals! You have applied for research! You will help us help you! Help to find the cure for cancer! First we need to verify you! A test will perform this! We hold no response for your safety!

Mondo Medicals is a first-person perspective puzzle game by cactus that puts the player in the role of someone participating in an experiment run by the titular Mondo Medicals to cure cancer. In order to find the cure for cancer, the player must go through 8 levels (called 'dissorientations'), where your task is to find the exit. The levels, built of blank, gray walls, require the players not to think "out of the box" as much as to devastate the box completely. To reach the exit on each level, you'll have to ignore obvious clues, distrust your seeing, and abandon typical computer-game thinking. After each level, the experimenter will monologue at you and direct you toward your next task.

Oh, and all the people in the game have TVs instead of heads.

It's got a sequel, Mondo Agency, which makes even less or even more sense, depending who you ask.

It's freeware, and can be downloaded here.


Provides examples of:

  • Alien Geometry: The stages are not called "Disorientations" for nothing. For example, the very first stage causes you to go in an infinite loop unless you go the opposite of where the arrows tell you.
  • Alliterative Title: Mondo Medicals.
  • Big Bad: The ending reveals that Shouty Guy, who has been directing you through the experiment, is actually a complete maniac who will do anything to kill cancer, including shooting the player to "kill the cancer inside them".
  • Bizarre Puzzle Game
  • Conspicuously Light Patch: You can walk through the light spots on walls.
  • Freudian Excuse: Shouty Guy's father died of cancer, which led him to obsess over it to the point of madness.
  • Gainax Ending: Apparently, you have the cancer, or maybe you are cancer. Shouty Guy shoots you. You just got "cured". Game over.
  • Heartbeat Soundtrack: The soundtrack consists entirely of heavy breathing and what appears to be a heartbeat.
  • Intentional Engrish for Funny: Used intentionally to both comedic and disturbing effect.
  • Mind Screw: The whole game.
  • No Indoor Voice: The Shouty Guy.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: You wander through the corridors (of the eponymous facility?), solving your way past mind-boggling obstacles and generally being confused and creeped out, and at the end - instead of any answers at all - you get a sudden bullet in the head.
  • Speaking Simlish: It's actually garbled, reversed speech.
  • Stylistic Suck: This game would be a whole lot less creepy in high-resolution, high-detail graphics. Meanwhile, the bad translation was intentional; Cactus is actually quite fluent in English, as his blog reveals.
  • Surreal Horror: The creepiness is mostly from the empty, featureless levels and the Shouty Guy's strange speeches. That, and the darned man on level 2 who opens his fanged mouth and roars at you when you try to talk to him.
  • The Topic of Cancer: It even provides the page quote. You are helping an experimenter find the cure for cancer by... going through 8 disorienting obstacle courses. The experimenter is very passionate about the Topic of Cancer.
  • TV Head Robot: Everyone, including, apparently, the protagonist.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Shouty Guy shoots people to prevent cancer from spreading.
  • What Could Have Been: The Shouty Guy was to appear in Super Meat Boy as an unlockable character. He was cut due to space concerns.
  • You Killed My Father: Shouty Guy's motivation for fighting cancer.
    WHEN I WAS YOUNG I SAW IT HAPPEN!
    A CANCER TOOK MY FATHER AND TURNED HIM TO DEATH!!
    IF HE WAS HERE TODAY I WOULDN'T LET HAPPEN!

Top