Manual Samuel (2016)

The premise of Manual Samuel is right there in the title. You take 'manual' control of a guy named Samuel. The 'manual' part probably deserves a little more explanation: after being involved in an accident, the Grim Reaper resurrects Sam with a challenge - survive a day with a handicap of the Grim Reaper's choosing, and he can go back to his life. The handicap? All of Sam's movements are manual - he has to make a concentrated effort to blink, to breathe, and to move his limbs.

This is a fairly unique idea, but how does that translate into gameplay? When played with a controller (as recommended), you get two buttons dedicated to breathing in and out. One more for blinking. LB/RB/LT/RT generally controls limbs. The right analog stick and D-pad are also thrown in to make things complicated.

The game then proceeds to run Sam through a gauntlet of challenges that make up his daily routine. This is where things break down. The challenge of holding Sam together is simply not fun. You go through these elaborate control schemes and end up gaining - nothing. There's no reward to offset the effort you put in. And that turns the gameplay into a chore very quickly.

This situation is made worse by a juvenile sense of humour. I got one or two chuckles out of the prologue, but after that it quickly devolves into cheap jokes and a lot of toilet humour. It's tolerable at best and off-putting at worst.

In short, Manual Samuel takes a somewhat interesting idea and runs it into the ground.

Just played the co-op version with my sister and it was actually surprisingly easy. Partly because I had already played through the whole story so I knew what to expect, and partly because only having half the responsibility meant you could just focus on that half (i.e. my sister didn't have to remember to blink, I didn't have to remember to breathe in, just to breathe out at some point when I saw that she had breathed in). It was harder in some parts where you have to be holding down buttons at the same time but once we talked through it we were pretty coordinated, and walking, which I thought would be much harder with each person controlling one leg, was actually a piece of cake.

We made it through almost the entire game but my sister gave up when we got to the final boss lol. Understandable because that part is so much trial and error and she was just tired of it lmao. It's also just fun to play with someone else and crack each other up. At the part where you have to run through the gate with the pod of lithidium (or whatever it was called) as soon as we got past the gate on time she was like "woohoo we did it!" and dropped the pod LMAO. Partly my fault because I didn't tell her we still needed it to put in the robot lol. It can be a fun wacky novelty kind of game to play with someone else for a while but you might not get far if you don't have a lot of patience or just can't get in sync with the other player.

Honestly I really loved this game, it was something new(ish*), albeit frustrating, and I liked the story and the humor. It was pretty short (I finished it in about 2.4 hours) and I feel like they could have done more with the unique mechanics, but I give it props for the overall concept and the creative ways they did use the control-each-body-part-separately idea.

*Yes I know this has been done before with QWOP and Octodad and possibly others I don't know of, and I've played QWOP before but haven't played Octodad so keep that in mind when I say this is fairly new to me. I still think the way this was used and how it tied into the story was cool.

The whole breathing thing actually made me feel like I couldn't breathe either, which was certainly interesting lol; I kind of like when games do something psychological like that to you even if it wasn't necessarily intended.

The art style wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but that can be subjective, and the Grim Reaper character got pretty annoying and unfunny after a bit although I did think it was an amusing interpretation of the mythical figure.

The thing that really got to me about the story though was – what did Sam do to deserve all of that torture??? T~T I don't think he deserved it, nobody deserves it ToT Yes he's a spoiled rich out-of-touch brat but think about it – this all starts with his girlfriend overreacting and assaulting him badly enough to give him a concussion, then after that he actually stops to pay for his coffee (plus make the barista rich with tips, even if that's only due to his stupidity), and then he still goes after her, presumably to apologize, and that's how he ends up in Hell?

I get that we don't know his whole life and maybe he was secretly a serial killer or something but I honestly felt so bad for him during the whole game LOL. I felt like he was the victim in all this and the face he's making throughout the whole game, with the wide-eyed thousand-yard stare of a broken man, made me want a happy ending for him. Plus toward the end of the game when he's struggling to speak and he's just saying things like "I'm scared" and "Leave me alone" I actually felt kind of sad lmao. And the part where he's sewed up in the guard's dead body reminded me of the movie Tusk, which traumatized me when I watched it. If you haven't heard of that movie look it up, you'll know what I mean.

Okay that aside I'm not really counting it against the game, maybe that's how you were supposed to feel. But I took a star off mostly because even with some really frustrating repetitive parts it was still so short, almost like it was padded out with some extra time-killers that don't enhance the game, i.e. make it take longer rather than challenging the player more. I wish it was more fleshed out and each section a little more complex because it does sort of end up feeling like a bunch of mini-games strung together. Though maybe I should be careful what I wish for considering mini-games are still pretty hard when you have to remember to breathe and blink every few seconds lol.

All that said, I did get enjoyment out of it, plus I got it for free; it's free on Humble Bundle until April 19 at 10 a.m. PDT if you sign up for their newsletter (if you're already signed up you still get it, I know cuz I was.) And yes it's actually free and not pay $1 minimum or something like their bundles. So I'd say give it a go if you can pick it up for free!