Game Review: Glitch

I started playing Glitch last week after seeing the trailer for it on a gaming site and deciding it might be an interesting way to waste a few hours. Oh, I wasted a few, all right. I'm now just under level 20 with skills as a Master Chef and lesser talents as a miner, farmer, and as an animal tender. This does not make me an expert in the game yet, although it does make a strong case for my OCD…er, my CDO.

But what I know so far leaves out a HUGE selection of skills which I cannot yet learn, and so while this is a thorough review of Glitch, it should not be considered a final review of the whole game. This review instead is much like my book reviews where I will not finish, except here, I'm still playing, and I just have to break away to give my impressions after roughly 150 hours of game play.

First, Glitch is a Flash game for web browsers, and players can customize their avatar in nice or humorous ways. I've seen guys that look like Stitch or masked riders, while players in game who know me have noted that I've made my avatar look like myself. (I do this in most games where customized avatars are possible, but apparently lots of gamers don't. Or, so I'm told.) Lots of combinations are possible, so whether you want to look like you or like Jokey Smurf, it's all good. You can go nude, or if you're cheeky but prudish, you can go nude, but wear black bars over your non-existent naughty bits. Some skin textures also make you look like a stuffed doll, and with a sewn mouth and button eyes, you can be Raggedy Anne or Andy. (Did I just date myself? Yes, I believe I did.)

Once you get into the game with your wacky avatar, (Or non-wacky, like mine) a talking rock mentor will guide you through a basic tutorial about petting things. Trees need petting, and pigs do too. Up to a certain skill level, pigs HAVE to be petted before you harvest meat using the Nibble command. So let that sink in…after petting a pig, you BITE into its side and rip out a few flank steaks. And the pigs love it…provided you pet them first. If you just bite them without foreplay, it's molest, and it makes the pigs cry. I swear, I'm not making this up. The game makers are, and they've got to have some great drugs in their offices.

Butterflies are massaged to get milk, and after you shake milk, you get butter. And after you compress butter, you get cheese. Why do you need cheese? For grilled cheese sandwiches in your sandwich grill. Duh.

Chickens are squeezed for grains…again, think on that. You're making the chickens vomit their meals and collecting the individual grains for your bread. (Again, working on that grilled cheese recipe.)

By the way, eggs don't come from chickens. Eggs grow on trees, and you season blank eggs to make pig eggs, butterfly eggs, or chicken eggs. Then you take the egg and have a chicken incubate it, provided you've studied Animal Kinship IV and Animal Husbandry. It's crazy, and yet in the context of the game world, it all sort of makes sense and works well together.

But getting back to making our food, in addition to the manual labor involved, there's also buying a grill and taking a grilling class so you know HOW to make grilled cheese sandwiches. There's lots of tools you can use without learning a skill, but the cost to use them is higher, and you wear out your tools faster. Using a tinkertool and the Tinkering skill set, you can repair just about anything you own, so investing in this early means not buying tools over and over and wasting your cash.

And, another good investment is better learning, which speeds up the time it takes you to learn other classes. And, given that classes can take up to 4 days without Better Learning, it really is in your best interest to take a few BL levels early on.

What else? Altars. The 11 creative "giants" who made the game demand sacrifices, and they give favor points in return. These bribes to the creative gods lead up to Emblem badges, which when spent allow you to take more advanced level training classes. Because of those Emblems, I was able to learn Cocktails II and Mining III. Oh, and if you aren't afraid to burn off a few favor points, while learning a new skill you can go to an altar and spend points to accelerate your learning. You can even go to multiple altars and make a lesson zoom by, if you're willing to spend the points. I did, which is why I'm level 19 after less than a week in the game. Mwa-ha. (Pro Tip: Mining is your go to skill to earn lots of cash or favor points. Just dump 30-40 raw minerals in, and *mwah* instant good karma.)

Oh, and something I love about this social game? The PLAYERS. They are awesomely sweet, and I can't walk through a level without someone kissing me, hugging me, giving me food, or just chatting me up. By the end of day one, I was passing out free food too. THEN I got a badge and realized the game rewards players for being nice. That's fucking awesome.

There's a lot of nice little touches, like all vendors offering good prices on broken tools to encourage recycling. The game also encourages team play and fosters an ideal of respect for one's environment. With educational underpinnings like this, you might think I'd say "put the kids on this NOW."

Erm, no. One of the first missions in the game is to buy 10 beers and chug them all. Based on missions like this, I would call this a casual game for adults and young adults, but kids might get some strange ideas from this, and I don't mean biting the family pet. You might just come home and find Johnny Jr. with a blender, half the fruit from your crisper, and half a bottle of Jack Daniels already gone. And then who's going to have to clean up after that Technicolor yawn has spewed past the cat? That's right, you. So hide this game from your kids and only play it yourself.

Actually, good luck even noticing you have kids or pets after starting this game. If I have one illegitimate complaint about this game it's that it may be TOO addicting. My Twitter stream is filling up with people going "Oh, my god, what happened to me in the last day? I've just been playing this game…AND I CAN'T STOP!" Seriously, it's like digital crack. I get up and open the game "just to check one thing," and three hours later my stomach is growling and my shoulders are sore from hunching over. I have to pee and the circulation is going out in my legs…but I have to harvest just one more egg tree before I go.

For a game named Glitch, it seems almost fitting that the game is buggy. But it is all kinds of buggy, sometimes even in infuriating ways. You're supposed to be able to drag and drop items with the game changing the context of your actions depending on your target. So, if you grab a cooked meal from your inventory to give it to another player or to donate it to an altar of the giants, you would see a little note above your dish that tells you the action depending on where you position the food. Except every third play, the menu gets stuck on one command, Link, which doesn't do anything useful. So no matter who you drop the food on, it isn't going anywhere. You have to click on the target, select a menu to give them something, and then peer through your HUGE inventory for that one freaking item that you could drag in the last level before the game glitched. (And if you have more than one of that food item in your inventory, you must additionally select how many to give.)

And while I'm complaining, I don't like how there's no text box allowing me to type in how much I want to give. The menus group stackable items in lots of 10, 20, 30, OR you can choose to give just one or give everything. Just, no. Seriously, would a text box fucking kill them? (>_<)

Butterflies are damned hard to click on, and most people opt to kamikaze dive at the poor thing and whack the Enter key to open a context menu at the moment of connection between avatar and butterfly. Which seems okay, but you have to do this twice to massage and then milk your flighty prey, and cheese, milk and butter are major components of lots of recipes. I don't mind the two step process, but I wish the butterflies' flight patterns were just a little less chaotic.

Reboots are frequent, and patches add new functionality all the time, which also add the potential for more bugs. But setting the technical problems aside, this is a really fun game. And when the browser is crashing out for a reboot, I admit, I love the error message: "WAIT! You were just about to win the game."

No, my fine friends, I am nowhere close to winning. But I know that after I finish writing this review and editing another serial episode, I'm going back into the game. I still have to learn how to make Gurly Drinks and buy a house to hatch my collection of butterflies on.

So, my current but not final verdict is four stars. It would have been five, but I do have to acknowledge that the bugs sometimes detract a lot from the game's elegant system. When this game works, it's beautiful. But when Glitch glitches, it can lead to eyelid twitches. Bitches.

This is damn fine entertainment, but I warn you again, this is digital crack. Sign up for free, and you WILL lose part of your life. Oh, and regular blog reader Widdershins would be amused to know that Glitch has a whole month named after her. I kept meaning to tell her that in previous comments, but I was already thinking about stuff I needed to do in the game. Yes, it's that addicting. (^_^)