I usually focus on games that have a bit of buzz around them, but sometimes, like a room believed to contain an angry wasp, it’s the lack of a buzz that can make me slightly more attentive. As was the case with this week’s subject, Hell Pie. I’d heard nothing about it before it popped up on Steam last week and very little subsequent discussion in the wider realms, and I wondered why that should be. It’s not the sort of thing that usually falls into the background noise of Steam indie releases, in that it’s not a survival crafter, an RPG maker game or a visual novel about being an anthropomorphic vixen with a penis who’s also Hitler. No, it’s a 3D collectathon platformer in your classic N64-era Banjo Kazooie sort of mould with the kind of visual variety and interesting easy to learn hard to master platforming mechanics that requires actual fucking effort to make, and it hits all the right notes that made A Hat In Time stand out so well, so why hasn’t it come up in general discourse? And then I played it for a bit and thought “Oh you know what it might be? It might be because it’s completely fucking disgusting. And no one’s talking about it for the same reason people don’t sit at the bar of a tapas restaurant talking about how their menstrual flow has been unusually gelatinous this month.
Hell Pie gleefully self-identifies as an “obscene platformer” on the Steam page and you pretty much know what to expect from anything that calls itSELF “obscene.” We’re in the realms of Conker’s Bad Fur Day that outwardly discourages being played by innocent kiddiwinks because it’s full of wee wees and poo poos, and as always this is a slim and slightly pathetic facade because it’s only kiddiwinks that are remotely amused by such things and actual adults who watch documentaries about the Cuban missile crisis and shit find it more tiresome than shocking. It’s like when the toddler looks over to make sure you’re watching before they dump an entire box of garlic powder onto the cat. And if you’re anything like me, you’re wondering even now if the title is supposed to be a pun. On Hell to Pay, perhaps? Or Eel pie? Or is Hell Pie some new cruel euphemism for the vagina of someone with bipolar disorder? Anyway, the framing premise is, you are a demon in hell and you are tasked with gathering all the ingredients for Satan’s special birthday pie. So I guess it really wasn’t a pun, just a frank description. It’s a game about a pie from hell.
See, my mistake was expecting a certain amount of wit from the game. Hell Pie is, to spoil my final summary, Conker’s Bad Fur Day without the wit. Yeah, swirl that one around the taste buds for a bit like a mouthful of vinegary cum. But let’s daintily put the cum to one side and focus on gameplay first. It’s a 3D platformer where the core mechanic is making your way through one of a variety of colourful themed environments looking for the vile disgusting object on your scavenger hunt list and optionally some vile disgusting upgrade tokens to develop your movement skills. You have a melee attack but basically every enemy dies in one hit so the game only has a combat element in the sense that the current British government has leadership. Traversal is the main unsanitary jacuzzi in which we will be spending most of the inexpensive cruise vacation of this game. To that end, our demonic protagonist is equipped with a cherub on a string that resembles how Donald Trump would look after eight hours locked in a sauna, and we can swing off it at any time in midair. That’s the unique platforming mechanic we’ll be getting the most mileage out of, and it works reasonably well.
I mean, it kinda breaks all the timed platforming challenges because you can just stop in mid-air and swing back and forth for as long as you need like a desperate metronome in the queue for the toilets. And towards the end when you’ve gone through the skill tree and can stop and swing four times before needing to land it breaks every other platforming challenge as well. Then again, everything else on the skill tree is pretty much useless so that balances out. I think. But if it’s good enough for Spider-Man it’s good enough for this tosh, and the swinging in itself is a strong enough core mechanic to sustain the game, the physics are responsive and cathartic and it has that Mario-style nuance where a casual player can get from one platform to the next efficiently enough but a skilled player can bend the environment over a pommel horse and turn its buttocks the colour of a workplace shooting massacre. Although you might not want to if you catch the environments on a bad day. Sometimes they’re tarted up and interesting tropical islands or posh restaurants but sometimes they show up to work with sweat pants and greasy hair and you get stuff like the fucking sewer level or the entire third hub world, Jungle. Not Jolly Jungle or Gelatinous Jungle, just Jungle. That’s literally all it says on the plaque over the door.
“All very well, Yahtz, but we’ve been stewing on the phrase ‘like Conker’s Bad Fur Day without the wit’ for the last two minutes and we’d like you to clarify, because that’s like saying ‘like Thomas the Tank Engine but without the sizzling erotic subtext.'” Alright, let me draw a direct parallel. In Conker’s Bad Fur Day you go inside a toilet and have a boss fight with a giant poo. And the poo sings an operatic song as it fights you with profane lyrics that rhyme the word scat with the word twat. This exhibits wit. It’s wit to rhyme with shit, but it’s wit. The humour lies in a poo, a very unrefined thing, singing opera, a style of music generally considered very refined. In contrast, in Hell Pie, you go into a sewer, and there are poos. And there’s no joke there. Some of the poo is alive and hostile and wearing Nazi helmets, but that’s not a joke either. There’s no comical through line from Nazi to poo. If the poos had all resembled former British home secretary Douglas Hurd, and had been called Douglas Turds, that would’ve been a joke with some wit. As it is all the game has done is dropped some poo on the floor and then looked at me as if it expected me to know what to do with it.
The tragedy of Hell Pie is that it had a lot going for it. A strong central mechanic, a nice vibrant appearance, clear dedication and effort from its creators, but it’s all let down by being really witlessly, off-puttingly crass. I’m sorry to have to side with your primary school homeroom teacher on this one, Hell Pie, but poo references just aren’t big or clever. And I have no idea who this game is even aimed at. Little boys whose idea of intellectual discourse is to compete to see who can yell “fanny flaps” the loudest in a crowded assembly? And of those, the subset that also wants to see small adorable baby animals being bloodily and painfully tortured for no particular reason every time you get a horn upgrade? All I can picture is that one kid I knew in middle school who mysteriously stopped coming to school around the time his sister showed up with burn scars and an eyepatch. There was a moment when I was in “Jungle” hanging around a bunch of anthromorphic mushroom characters and thinking “Well this isn’t particularly obscene,” until I noticed that the scavenger hunt item I was looking for was a quantity of white liquid strongly implied to be jizz and I realised “Oh for fuck’s sake they’re supposed to be cocks, aren’t they.” Oh. Jizz Jungle. That would’ve worked.
