PC
In 2020, adventure game developer Octavi Navarro released The Supper, a fifteen-minute-long point-and-clicker about a strange lady, Ms Appleton, who runs a small restaurant that kills and cooks all its customers. It was strange, peculiarly unsettling, and gruesomely entertaining. It now has a sequel! A far bigger game, set a few decades later, and it somehow makes the original feel like a family-friendly fairytale.
Navarro has since teamed up with Susanna Granell to form White Blanket Games, and the pair have concocted a sequel that’s far more macabre, while maintaining those core elements of, er, murder and cannibalism. And if you’re thinking, “Ah, yes, but of course it’s all arch satire about…” no, hold your horse heads, this is a game about macabre murder and cannibalism. It’s pretty funny, too.
Stewie S. Appleton is Ms Appleton’s great-grandson (perhaps great-great-grandson?), born long, long after she died. The game begins when Stewie was a child, visiting a carnival with his grandfather. A sideshow features the tale of his deceased relative, how she killed and cooked her victims, and Stewie’s grandfather is furious at the lies being told. (I replayed The Supper at this point, given it’s been five years, and no, they weren’t lies.) Stewie seems to idolise her, but not so much that he can be torn away from wanting to visit the Vampire haunted house.
Decades later, Stewie is a very lonely adult, running the isolated Twin Sisters Motel, while living in a large house with just…um…a straw effigy of his grandmother for company. Oh, and a crow. I think. There’s a crow called Martin the Crow that spoke to him as a child, and still does as an adult, but there’s never actually a crow. The crow has suggestions. Stewie is disaffected, miserable and poor, so lacking for money that all he can bring to the table to share with his straw grandparent is cooked rat. Martin the Crow encourages him that perhaps it’s time for him to personally improve the world, rid it of its evils, and at the same time solve his food issues. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to start murdering and eating the motel clients.
You might think at this point that I’d that things take an ironic twist, or speak to society’s greater ills, but no, this is about Stewie finding reason to murder each of his guests and then eat them. But it’s a fun video game! So to be able to prepare his dinner, he needs ingredients, and that involves visiting the local town and surrounding area to solve all sorts of point-and-click adventure puzzles to gather them! Each day there’s a new victim to interrogate and kill, and a new trip to the coastal town to find the things he needs. Each night, after dinner, Stewie dreams of a game show, the Free Yourself From Guilt programme hosted who may be Martin the Crow and human-bodied unicorn. It’s all good! Everything’s fine!
(To step aside from my existential musing, I have a couple of mechanical gripes. The cooking minigame requires you to click to stop a bar as it passes over the green area of a meter, but it’s so fast and the green is so tiny that I found I almost always missed–it ultimately doesn’t matter, beyond Stewie’s despondence at his failure, but it felt slightly too tricky. The other is the nightly dream. It’s interesting the first couple of times, but sitting through the intro and repeated dialogue doesn’t hold up after that–I don’t really think it added anything to the game overall.)
The whole thing, as you’d expect from Navarro and Granell, is superbly drawn and written. The puzzles are inventive, if perhaps a little too easy, and the gore is…it’s awful. Brilliant, but awful. I mean, this game–which I thoroughly enjoyed–is reprehensible. It’s so morally bankrupt that it kept taking me aback. It exists to be horrific, and I find that really fascinating. So often games like this are tripping over themselves to apply some sort of rationale for the horror, attempting to be About Something such that the destestation feels justified. This is a game about a very broken man doing terrible things, and yeah, you’re the one doing them, because it’s you holding the mouse.
Far more interesting I think is just how far The Supper: New Blood goes to be irredeemable. My favourite aspect of this is quite how deliberately almost every element of it is designed to look like a LucasArts adventure from 1993. It’s all stunning pixel art (I’m in danger of taking this for granted from Navarro, but it merits being recognised every time), perfectly aping the exaggerated style of Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max (alongside this game and Maniac Mansion both heavily borrowing from Psycho).
In LucasArts’ games, the characters are barely any less morally horrendous than Stewie here, willing to commit any crime and ruin any life in pursuit of an inventory object that will solve a puzzle, but it’s all done with a gleeful grin, a wink to camera that it’s just a bit of fun. In so many ways, New Blood feels like the natural consequence of such behaviour, the actions without the winks. That it sets its unapologetic awfulness in a world that looks like it was drawn by Larry Ahern makes this all the more stark.
This sense of dreadfulness is taken further by how absolutely nothing else in the game is OK, either. Stewie doesn’t exactly stand out in this company, the motel’s guests barely any better, while the local area is broken, falling apart, and riddled with abandoned horrors. It’s all so bleak, so hopeless. The chief cop is corrupt running a protection racket, there’s a dead body in the local diner’s freezer, the rivers are all filthy and poisoned… But you’re using the vinegar on the rusty lever to release the potatoes! It’s an adventure game! Sure, the falling potatoes were meant to be the means of killing a prisoner, but everyone involved seems to have died before anyone got around to it, the prisoner included. But it’s a fun game with puzzles!
And it is. It’s a fun game with puzzles. That’s fine. That’s definitely fine. Right?
- White Blanket Games
- £8.50/$10/€10
- Steam, Itch
- Official Site
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