WARCHIMP

This game is a nice solid 5, but I'm rating it a 6 because of the highly entertaining concept and great execution despite the short length.

WARCHIMP is one of those once in a while IF pieces you wish was taken and made into a video game. Its the modern Planet of The Apes movies mixed together perfectly with either Fallout or the Wasteland series, and boy is that a concept I think deserves a proper epic.

Malk's creativity and writing ability really shine through here, with the all-caps choices and title combined with the apes' culture and history really making you feel and think like an animal, right down to the simplistic presentation. It all comes together well in a shockingly effective and amusing, crafty way.

After learning more about the regulars here during my first days, its no surprise Malk was able to pull something like this of so well. This game is an unintentionally hilarious romp through a primate-dominated post-nuclear world. However, it is so good and works so well that reaching any of the ends leaves you longing for more and leaves behind a bittersweet taste in your mouth.

PLay it, read all the possible routes, you won't regret it. But wish upon a shooting star that the author will return to this concept one day, because Goddamn does it deserve it.

It's taken me much longer to find the words for this review than it did to actually read the story. It's rare to find a piece of writing that just so instantly and unapologetically grabs you and pulls you in this way, even on this site. Even as a "sequel", everything here feels utterly fresh and unique.

I like it better than CYBERMONKEY. That's right, you heard me. They're identical in length, but CYBERMONKEY was like the light, delectable appetizer to WARCHIMP's rich, complex, and fragrant main course. It seems insane that the story is really only just 4000 words and something Malk bashed out for a last minute deadline; it offers so many dizzying glimpses into this intensely badass world, I could easily believe he'd run dozens of campaigns there and had a novel's worth of notes on the lore. I'm talking about even simple lines like: "This is a land rife with ghosts; the Red Wood of Khal Al-Forn, where the ancestors climb invisibly into eternity." that are just so evocative of setting and tone that they set the mind reeling from the tastiness of the worldbuilding possibilities.

If this is all just an illusion of depth, it's a damn good one and the finest thing by far that has ever come out of Malk's ass and then been written about at length.


He's in top form with the writing here too. The action scenes are phenomenal as usual with his work, and the imagery and atmosphere and the whole energy of this thing just work together to make it more than the sum of it's parts. It's only 4000 words! There are barely any choices! But somehow none of that matters. I've read stories six times its length with not nearly as much to say.


TL;DR The Planet of the Apes reboots met a cybernetically implanted Conan and had a baby. No one human can fail to be moved by this glorious saga; certainly no ape.

SPOILERS AHEAD: Blast and damn all of you who read this prematurely.

One of the main reasons chimpanzees cannot effectively play guitars or throw spears, is not only a matter of articulation, but because of the way their nervous system works. While humans are able to pick and choose in certain ways which gives them an aptitude for finesse, the limbs of an ape will activate a muscle group all at once. They cannot make minor adjustments in the throes of their overwhelming force. They have the capacity to be gentle creatures, but their active movements are always from the whole mechanism of that limb. More than a few misguided "pet" owners have found their bones broken or their chests caved in for participating, willing or not, in what a chimp would consider horseplay. They kill each other without necessarily meaning to in the wild all the time.

This world, and the apes in it, struck me immediately with overwhelming force. And yet there was also refinement and layers to the worldbuilding that allowed me to see more, and new things, every time I re-read it. There was the colorful brutality of the ape, yet with the capability for fine adjustment and detail. I was gripped by this game, as if by great and terrifying simian limbs with biological modifications. This was not just a monkey's tale, this was WARCHIMP.

WARCHIMP is the perfect sequel, better than anything we would have hoped for. Better even than the original, which is no small feat. It perfectly expanded on and escalated the themes and worldbuilding of the previous in unexpected ways, even though the worlds of both of them couldn't seem more different.

Even having read the first one (and a few paths multiple times) before writing the review for CYBERMONKEY, I have read this one far more. I don't think I've kept count, but I suspect I will have reread WARCHIMP more times in the coming months than I will have reread CYBERMONKEY since the time it was published. Even the national treasure that CYBERMONKEY is, it had its minor flaw, (could it even be called a flaw?) in that I could definitely pick out an ending that was my favorite and perhaps better than all the others. This was different. To ask me to choose between hunting Laserbears, founding the Chrome Horde, and being christened President of the United States by the voice of the Machine God, would be like asking a man to choose between his children.

Powerful verbiage broadcast a clear and concise picture of a future time period so stark, brutal, and alien to our own. A portrait of a time when humans are no longer the dominant species, and apes... Are no longer purely apes. We see the world through the lense of a primitive, surviving in the graveyard of an unimaginably advanced civilization. This world is the ghost of what we've seen in detail from the game before this, but the protagonist of WARCHIMP has no such luxury. The artifacts of the earth we know are but haunted talismans- And the laserbear... Is it even a bear? Or is it some lumbering half-flesh mechanical abomination that our ape eyes rationalise as a bear?

Immediately we are made to experience a vivid and terrifying nightmare of our future as the human race, and the consequences our actions have wrought on our primate cousins. But the tapestry of WARCHIMP is rich and complicated. As we hew out a bloody survival- And even come to thrive in this landscape, one starts to wonder... Has the downfall of Man truly spelled a dark age for intelligent life in our world, or has our world simply... Evolved, to something different? Something that remembers the primal things that the animal human had forgotten until its final moments?

This was brilliant, 8/8, I would commend it if I could, but... I already did. You see, I wanted to read WARCHIMP early so bad that I sent Cybergibbon contractors to download your entire computer and then emulated it so that I could access your account and watch the story unfold in person. I didn't realize I was still using your stolen session data when I finally pressed the button. My shame and contrition are immeasurable; but let it be known that anyone who says Malk commended himself is committing a GRAVE SLANDER!

It's a good short adventure set in a violent age, so don't expect to find a peaceful ending. The choices to make are clear and the consequences follow more or less logically. A very different setting to most stories! Imaginative.

Needs more chimp murder and Josiah Smith rep (give him a chance, he's a really cool guy). ;)

I enjoyed the story, and the images were good.

A little bit confusing, but the story line is immaculate

This story-game has a very interesting premise. Not only has it got shades of the Planet of the Apes movies, but it kind of reminds me of Harlan Ellison's novella, "A Boy and His Dog," which is set after WWIII and has roving gangs of teenage boys who are assisted by super-intelligent telepathic dogs descended from bioengineered dogs made to assist soldiers in the war. I was really intrigued by the tribe of cybernetically-modified chimpanzees and their tribal society. I really got a kick out of the horse-riding, sword-wielding gorilla who tried to convert our protagonist and his friend to Islam. That's the kind of bizarre, out-of-left-field thinking I just love to see in stories. My only issue was how abruptly the whole thing ended. I understand it's a sequel to another story-game, so maybe I should just go and read that. But I simply love the level of creativity in this game. I'd like to see more of the apes' strange, Post-Apocalyptic world.

A war ridden world, rife with cybernetic animals, and intertwined with an odd mysticism, WARCHIMP offers us a glance into this world that has me hungry for more...and the actual game itself is alright too!

This short n' sweet romp is a fun thirty minutes. Through the eyes of a young and daring gorilla, the writing reflects well the weird lense these animals view their surroundings through, leaving us just enough context clues to fill in the blanks. The writing doesn't take itself too seriously, which gives this the same feel you'd get from an early 2000's war game. It's certainly worth a play.

I don't know what it is, but I know what I like.