Potato Thriller Steamed Potato Edition Review

Portal - the original from 2007 - is what I would consider a perfect game: it does what it wants to and doesn’t last any longer than it needs to. You get what you need from it and then it’s over. Potato Thriller does not follow in those footsteps, and while I only played for two hours it seemed like six.

Trying to cash in off the success of Hideo Kojima’s PT, Potato Thriller starts out as a first person “walk through a corridor” simulator and attempts a few jump scares. This section lasts about ten minutes and if the game had ended there I wouldn’t have praised it overly but I’d have been a lot more lenient with it. Instead, it has taken two hours of my life from me and I doubt I’ll ever get them back.

From there, we play a very brief section in third person, controlling a bounty hunter who is after the Potato Man, a notorious serial killer. Joining him in his escapades is his robotic son who is always wearing pyjamas. The duo then clip through a model of a pear that has rotary blades on the top and it takes off. At this point I was actively wishing the game had ended.

An actual in game loading tip, and donkey isn't an insult

The problem that I had with this game is I was definitely not the target audience. This “LOL SO RANDOM” humour passes all the way through the game, but there aren’t any actual jokes. In one section in an elevator, we’re treated to five minutes of fart jokes that wouldn’t have been funny at a five-year old’s birthday party. The developers also seem to insist that calling someone a donkey is an insult, and use it multiple times. Repetitive humour is fine, but it has to actually be funny to start with.

Mostly all the dialogue is spoken using text-to-speech software, though there are a couple instances of real voices used for sound effects like the aforementioned pear helicopter. On top of that though are open source sound effects which make the person saying “chup” over and over again stand out like a sore thumb. Adding to the low quality feel is the text on the wall, which can be seen through the walls. This is a pretty common Unity problem that is easily - and I’m talking changing one option in the text settings -  fixed, and was present when this game launched back in June.

This is probably my biggest issue with Potato Thriller: I feel like I’ve put more effort writing this review than the developers did making this game. On the Steam page, they claim that it is a satire, but satire isn’t a blanket to protect yourself from the criticism of making a terrible videogame. Satire isn’t being the thing you think you’re making fun of, and for something that is supposed to be aping the fantastically designed PT that doesn’t make any sense anyway.

Donkey is not an insult. Please Stop.

There are so many things wrong with this game, from the basic Unity bugs to the awful cutscenes that don’t feature any animation, or the lack of any real design cohesion whatsoever. The only good thing I can say about this game is that it didn’t crash, though it certainly tried on a few loading screens, which probably account for two thirds of my playtime.