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(+2)

I honestly think this game is too ambitious for its own good.

The island is huge, but the protagonist walks painfully slow, and trying to keep the badly-driving car on the too-narrow roads is a nightmare. It's annoyingly sparse, and I would have preferred a smaller, more focused space.

I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or why. Maybe I missed something in the opening narration (which I'll get to in a bit), but I didn't have any clear objective, and there's no indication in-game of where to go next.

I toyed around for a while, made it to the top of the not-mayo factory, watched the cutscene, ziplined down, ended up near the start. I went to the houses, but nothing happened, maybe because of a glitch. Got caught by the turtle a few times; it's not entirely clear what's happening here.

There are definitely some cool mechanics. As mentioned before, there's a drivable car! That's something I've been wanting to do for years, but haven't, because it's hard. You can climb ladders, walk tightropes, and slide down ziplines.

The music is too loud, especially early on when it basically drowns out the opening narration.

Your trademark style is back, mixing simple primitives with blobby characters and hyper-realistic textures. Once again, it works great for that so-bad-it's-good aesthetic.

I was scared the whole time I was playing the game, because the whole thing feels incredibly fragile. Like one bad jump, one random glitch, or one wrong keypress is going to totally wipe out all the progress I've made. That's the case for a lot of jam games, but the scope of this one makes it all the more apparent.

I know it's SBIG Jam, but I really feel this game would benefit from quality-of-life improvements, even at the cost of overall scope. Small stuff like interact prompts and skippable dialogue would be nice, saves and tools to get out of broken situations would be even better.

There is a load button, but I have no idea if it's real, and that only adds to the fragile feeling.

I did love the overall humour and the framing device of a defunded tourism ad. The Itch page and the early prompts in the menu, as well as a few references in game, all work together to push this angle and it is glorious.

To me this one was a swing and a miss, but it was still fun to fool around with for a while.

(+1)

I managed to get in contact with some anonymous sources from Shandy Pants Studios! (To reiterate, I am an independent archivist with no legally defined connection with the developers, and am *definitely* not a 1st party as defined by section 4.7.28 of their Confidential Disclosure and Exports Agreement).

Apparently when gaining the first round of seed funding from the Tortoise Island Media Fund, the developers agreed to make the in-game location a 1:1 scale replica of Tortoise Island! While it's extremely impressive that they managed to map the landscaping to the nearest millimetre 😮 (trust me I've seen the photo comparisons!), it was a bit of a major issue in development, considering that about 70% of Tortoise Island is made up of flat plains of grass 😑

of course, this wouldn't have been a problem! Due to the 67 hours of scripted content originally planned for the game (The completionist time was estimated to be about 4027 hours, but it also included a mission where you had to count each blade of grass on the island). On top of this, they managed to negotiate a sponsorship with the TT (Tortoise Trophy) in order to bring motorbike racing to the game. The motorbikes could get from one side of the island from another in just 2 minutes, the tortoplane (planned for the shell Islands expansion pack) could get from one side to the other in just 30 seconds, and the tortoporter could get from one side to the other in only -2 seconds! (Yes, I asked how that worked. No, I didn't get an answer). None of these materialised by the time the plug was pulled though 😥

When I asked why the game felt so broken and fragile-feeling, I was told "Life is fragile, and 'You did WHAT?!?! with my salad?' is the most true-to-life game there is". After telling them to to knock off the BS marketing spiel, I was told that they just ran out of time before the funding dried up 😥 apparently though the save system was actually fully working all along though, so at least that's good I guess! 😅

Finally, they said thank you so much for playing! The whole team is very sad they can't talk about the game directly, and can't publicly make their case to The Game Awards. They've also said for future players to make sure to grab the salad! 🥗 or that might otherwise break things.