User:Bensin/Eat Me (interactive fiction)

Eat Me is a 2017 interactive fiction game by Chandler Groover.

It is (2018) Groover's most successful game to date.

Plot and gameplay


The player is a child locked in a dungeon of a castle made of food. The game, like many other of Grover's games, is a "limited parser" and the only actions permitted are moving around, examining things, and eating.

Development
In 2015, Groover had and idea for a game called Bag, in which the player would be Morgan le Fay with a bottomless magical bag and bag items in Camelot, from small to large, and end with bagging the castle. He shelved that game when a game with similar concept, Take, was released, but still wanted to create a game where the player destroys a castle. After appearing on the podcast Clash of the Type-Ins, Eat Me started to take form after "candy dungeons" were mentioned.

Groover tried to avoid metaphors and instead describing most things in the game as what they are. He wrote "It can be harder to describe something as what it is, rather than what it's like".

As inspiration, Groover cited the Middle Irish tale The Vision of Mac Conglinne, the Tchaikovsky ballet The Nutcracker (especially George Balanchine's version), "Hansel and Gretel" (both the Brothers Grimm's fairytale and Engelbert Humperdinck's opera), the board game Candy Land, Adventure Time, and the country folk song "The Big Rock Candy Mountains". He wroted that "Arthurian legend remains the game's foundation."

Grover wrote that "Ever since I started writing parser games, I've been criticized for not making them traditional enough. This game was my attempt to satisfy those critics while also writing something I wanted to write, but it was hard. I kept vacillating between liking the game and hating it. I felt like I was caving to demands from the last people I should've appeased."

The source code contained 104,088 words, and the game contains 43 rooms with a total of 410 things.

Reception
Bruno Dias of Vice praised the puzzles as cleverly entertaining and wrote that "Like most of [Groover's] work, it's a story in which fairy tale logic is taken in a horrifyingly, deliriously dark direction.", "it luxuriates in the gross and grotesque" and called Eat Me "a particular treat". He wrote that "The writing completely revels in its funny-horrifying-repulsive premise." and "There's a Lewis Carroll quality to the ideas and prose here, but the horror has been dialed way up". Dias warned that Eat Me may put some people off, but also wrote that "its simplicity of interaction might make it a good on-ramp onto the genre—even if the subject matter is a little hard to swallow."

Game designer Emily Short used Eat Me as an example of freeware text adventures with characterized protagonists, short duration, experimental structure, and esoteric premise. She discribed the visual descriptions as "lavish, baroque, sometimes grotesque", and also in line with Groover's other pieces, of which one highlighted work was The Queen's Menagerie. Short wrote that she felt glutted before she finished the game, but that "like most of what Groover writes — it's a striking and memorable piece." Short also wrote in 2016 about Groover's game The Queen's Menagerie (also a game about consumption) that he had "a gift for surprising dialects and baroque choices".

Brian Rushton, in a 2018 essay reviewing Groover's body of work, wrote that the game was a "rich and decadent and gruesome game" and that it was "light on puzzles but strong on implementation."

Sam Neils wrote in 2019 that Eat Me successfully sidestepped the dilemma of excessively open-ended puzzles by employing the limited parser, while also presenting interesting puzzles that were more complicated than they first appeared. He wrote "you feel like a savage invader hellbent on consuming everything in sight no matter the cost!" and that the game overall was "a refreshing take on the puzzle design of contemporary Inform games".

Groover's beta-testers had warned him that players might react poorly to the dungeon's grisliness, but he was not prepared for how negatively some players would react to the game itself.

Awards and recognition
At the 2017 XYZZY Awards, the game won "Best Writing" and "Best Implementation". It was also nominated in the categories "Best Game", "Best Setting", "Best Puzzles", "Best NPCs", "Best Individual Puzzle" (Milking the cow), and "Best Individual NPC" (The narrator).

The game won 2nd place in the 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition, losing to The Wizard Sniffer. Grover wrote "I had my sights set on first, but any placement near the top is an honor, especially in a field this large."

The game is (2023) listed as the #10 game in the IFDB Top 100, and was voted #8 (tie) top Interactive Fiction of All Time in a September 2023 vote among members.