TRASH

General Recommendation: This game is either your thing, or it’s not. If it is your thing, you’ll have an excellent time and will find it quite entertaining, and I recommend it. However, there are going to be some people for whom the humor in this story just doesn’t land.
Preview: Can you get a job and make enough money to convince your girlfriend to sleep with you at the end of the day?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
The narrator of this story seems to have all the traits I disliked about the Geek, and none of the cleverness and resourcefulness that made him likeable. Even on the pathes where you succeed at making a quick buck, the narrator learns nothing, and nothing in his life really changes.
That said, the consistency of the narrator’s tone and attitude throughout the story ties together all the disparate branches. He is characterized quickly and effectively, and he keeps the story grounded despite the bizarre events that happen around him.
Everything here feels incredibly real. With most games there’s some sense of disconnect with the real world, but all the characters feel like real people you could actually meet and talk to, and somehow even all the bizarre events that happen are grounded by the narrator’s attitude towards them. Character voice and tone setting is done extremely well.
The mundanity and similarities between many of the endings (returning home to Tina) makes a nice bookend for all of the branches. You go out, you have a weird day, and then you go home. There’s a sense of rythym and cycle to this game that ties together all the branches. This game feels quite episodic, with all the plots feeling like things that could have happened to this character on different days.
For the most part, this story just leaves me wondering what the point was. Most of the endings are extremely mundane, with nothing changing in the protagonist’s life, and nothing meaningful happening during the story.
I’m still rating it an 8, because I try to rate games on quality rather than personal preference, and the only reason I didn’t enjoy this as much as some of EndMaster’s games is that I’m not in the target audience. Nevertheless, I can appreciate the craft and care that went into it, and for what it is, it’s very well done.

Specific notes:
-I get the sense this story is going to have a lot of gross-out humor, which isn’t really my thing. EndMaster has a talent for doing themes I dislike well, however, so I’ll reserve judgement.
-An… alligator? Was not expecting that.
-Employer killed in alligator attack, so the only logical thing to do was pick the cash register for change.
-There is plenty of gross-out humor, but so far it’s done in a way that’s more zany than genuinely disgusting. EndMaster doesn’t go into vivid descriptions, rather letting the reader use their imagination, which is more effective.
-Why is Tina dating this guy?
-The description of Jim’s room does a good job of characterizing him quickly and effectively.
-I find it amusing that you become a quasi local hero for getting into a scuffle with a guy with a brothel.
-I suspect th sequence at the pig farm will mean more to me when I get to Suzy’s Strange Saga.
-Also amusing that you accidentally provoke your cousin’s killing spree and just kind of leave.
-Crazy cat lady seems incredibly suspicious, but possibly rich.
-Lol you get cursed to be followed around by cats. The horror!
-I like that characters appear across multiple pathes, like Dan.
-The alien abduction is completely random, but fits oddly well with the tone of the work.

Grammar
Generally good.
Mastery of Language
Eh, not great. There’s a number of sentence structure issues. It fits well with the narrator’s haphazard nature, however.

Branching:
There’s an incredible amount of branching here. Pretty much every choice goes into its own unique narrative. The branches are generally not very deep, allowing for a reader to go quickly through a lot of different possible options.

Player Options/fair choice:
Generally good, outcomes are fair and predictable. There are some exceptions to this.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
This is the first of EndMaster’s games I hadn’t played before, so it was nice to read some fresh material. The first ending I got was the one where you get a job at the burger place and get fired for being in the room when an alligator busted out of the toilet.

CONCLUSION: Not my thing personally, but an objectively well-crafted story.

Whereas the Basement Dwellers and Repression found its humor in absurd plot and crazy situations, TRASH finds a lot of its humor in character and dialogue, and that’s really cool. It's all about atmosphere. Totally successful in that. There’s *so* much dialogue here, and it’s very characterful. I sort of want to see what else Endmaster can do that's not this genre of sad sack losers having bizarre adventures, but it's totally entertaining. I enjoyed playing and I laughed a lot.

In one ending you wake up with a “spring embedded in your ass and a stray dog pissing on your leg.” If I had to pick one sentences to embody this game, it’s that. This game delights in your character’s humiliating ends, and then insists on also pissing on you, almost casually, as if this were just business as usual. Which it is for the protagonist.

The game is structured such that you go out, try to get something done (or not) usually fail horribly (or succeed horribly) and then Tina, your woman, passes judgment on you. These one liners are often really funny (“What got set on fire?” is one that made me laugh.) and serves the same sort of narrative purpose as the end lines of the paths in Repression, but it’s more powerful here in a character’s voice rather than the narrator’s.

The narrator is very present here and mocks you with a sort of eyebrow-arched sarcasm. ("Reach for those stars..." when deciding to better your condition by picking up metal scraps.) A lot of the humor comes from the narrator's lofty but weary tone.

The minor characters have amusing dialogue—actually most of the work of the description is done through dialogue. Dan, for example has lines like “What?” and “I dunno” and “Oh shit” which, well, tell you just about everything you need to know about this guy. Jim coughs. There’s clear, and funny, characterization—easy to read, easy to remember. Cousin Clem has all the best lines, though, with all of the obvious turns of phrase that have to be in here ("...that indoor plummin’ I’ll tell you what!")

I enjoyed this. I think at the end of the day I liked Repression better because I thought it was more tightly constructed and the writing felt more powerful, but this game was meant to be lighter. There were a few forks that were a little less interesting to me, but I think that's to be expected when there are so many of them. The game feels very, very similar in structure, theme, and tone to Basement Dwellers and Repression, and while that's not a bad thing, I'm noticing it as I play through Endmaster's games, and I really want to see where else he goes.

This game, much more than the other two I've read so far has many more microlevel issues. Like, it's actually harder to read without any spaces between lines of dialogue, which is usually, but not always, the case. It’s painful, because with paragraphing, punctuation stuff, and basic spellchecking (“gask mask”; “When Tina comes home she makes to correct assumption”) this already good story would be even better. I am dying to take my red pen to this game but I have been advised to exit professor mode when reading these. But, man, I want that red pen.

Hot damn, I forgot how hilarious this story was. For some reason, while I remember it being funny, I did not remember it being nearly as great as it is. It’s always nice to have expectations differ from reality in such circumstances.


Mel is a disgustingly lazy slob and the definition of white trash, but TRASH did not read quite like playing as a total loser and degenerate the way, for example, some of those tales from the basement did. After all, AT LEAST HE DOESN’T FUCK PIGS. That added to the story, I think, because it was hilarious to see him of all people be straight man at times.

While some of the choices join together again at the beginning of the story, after that every branch is unique—and quite different from one another. The story is more broad than deep. In one branch the main character works for a brothel, in another he is totally abducted by aliens, and yet another turns into something from a slasher horror film. So TRASH is definitely worth making extensive use of that back button for. The dissonance between the events and the main character’s attitude towards them in some of the paths is highly entertaining as well.
Despite the relatively long length of the story and all the possible events happening in a single day, it never became less entertaining for me than it had been earlier, even when I read it mostly in a few large chunks over just two days either.

The entire Cousin Clem path led to continuous laughter on my part, especially some of the endings. However, my favorite ending is probably the one in which Mel is fired from the hamburger joint, fries some bacon, and pisses on the floor. Made me laugh. Toilet humor can be very funny. There. I said it.
The scene in which he is looking for a station to listen to was also pretty great.
“Fuckin’ rap garbage, they need to remember to put the “c” back in front of that brand of…whatever the fuck it’s suppose to be, cause it ain’t music.”
Is a great line that I am going to steal and save for later use now.


That all being said, the humor in TRASH is not for everyone. If you are easily offended, then please heed the warning in the description. I have a feeling that readers not doing that may be a good part of why the rating is not higher than it is, which is really too bad.

If, however, you are some queer who reads reviews before storygames, and you are still reading them after reading what everyone has said about TRASH, just go read the story. It’s great.

You really are a writer, man.

Hehehe

No job needed that scene was uh... something!

Well, it's good, uhhh odd at the same time. But i have to give it some points for it being commended on my real birthday.

It was good.

A cure for depression.

It has a really good writing style.

I found the story both funny and entertaining, but what I enjoyed most is the fact that Endmaster showed very well in how many different directions you could take a story. Every path lead to something quite different and reading it was very entertaining. That's something I, as someone quite new to writing can learn a lot from.