Let’s Play A Game Review

The Black Sheep

Choose your own adventure and horror sounds like the perfect marriage between genres. And that marriage has previously resulted in beautiful children, Until Dawn and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead. Let’s Play a Game is the black sheep of the family. It’s an uninspired rip-off of popular horror movies from the last half-century. The scariest thing about Rabbit Mountain’s newest adventure game is the number of ads you’ll come across.

Let’s Play a Game is split into chapters, and in these chapters, you take on the role of different protagonists trying to escape different terrifying scenarios. While trying to escape, they must complete tasks and make choices that eventually lead to their escape. The game doesn’t deviate from this loop. And it’s not a fun loop.

The gameplay consists of solving puzzles, moving objects, and making choices to progress. But these mechanics are largely inconsequential. Most puzzles in the game are heavily reliant on chance. To mitigate that fact, when failing a puzzle, the player receives unlimited second chances. There’s also no time limits, leaving zero incentive to finish puzzles or make decisions quickly. The lack of consequence to these choices creates a lack of tension. And that lack of tension permeates the entire game.

An Ugly World

Let’s Play a Game does itself no favors by being largely unappealing. Unappealing to play, unappealing to look at, and unappealing to listen to. On top of puzzles having no consequence to failing them, they’re not challenging. Solving most of them won’t take more than a single try. The puzzles that will take more than one try are the ones that rely on chance. A few puzzles would make fun games themselves, but none received the attention needed to make them entertaining stand-alone games.

Exploration in Let’s Play a Game is a linear path with no choice of where to go. While walking through seemingly endless hallways, players can take in the bare walls and uninspired set dressing that add nothing to the game’s world. And with an unappealing world comes unappealing characters. Well, a few will be appealing to some. Most character models are reused across chapters, dressed in different clothing, and donning new names. This wouldn’t be as detrimental if any of them had personalities. The characters are just there to be agents of a story that doesn’t exist. Players can’t get attached to these characters because they have no character. In fact, some character models might repel players.

Let’s Play an Ad

The relationship this game has with its female characters is awful. It treats most women as objects to be saved or sexualized. Most times both. At a few points in the game, you will have to decide whether a person lives or dies based on a certain amount of information. Most of the scenarios the women will present you with involve some sort of sexual act they committed. One woman was on trial because she “sold her body to pay for rent.” These types of attitudes towards women and what they do with their bodies are regressive and harmful. Players who are sensitive to those topics will take issue with that aspect.

But an aspect that everyone will take issue with is the number of advertisements this game shoves in your face. It is near impossible to go a minute in Let’s Play a Game without coming across an ad. The only way to remove these ads is to pay two dollars. Obviously, I don’t recommend this.

Let’s Play a Game is a mess. It’s as if the developers at Rabbit Mountain had a horror movie marathon, felt inspired, whipped this up in a few hours, and then released it onto Google Play. If you’re a fan of horror movies, horror games, or the choose your own adventure genre, stay away from this game.