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Like playing a brief, experimental creepypasta!

  • Chilly
  • 07/14/2016 09:45 PM
  • 773 views
Much well-received art--be it game, music, or cinema--tends to be dark, and often not in a surface way. Think of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: your local video store (if such things still exist) files it in the comedy section, but the movie tells a story in which
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the world as we know it ends in nuclear explosion.
Similarly, Cootie Patootie is a game about searching the cavernous innards of the Earth for love that
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ends in the kind-of-sort-of titular character (her actual name is 'Cootie Patrootie') apparently deciding that life is not worth the effort after determining that she will never be loved because she cannot love herself... unless you choose to tell her that you want nothing to do with her, in which case, you end up getting a 'The End'.


As the author asserts on the game's summary page, Cootie was erected in 22 hours for the Ludum Dare 35 event (Ludum Dare is a 72-hour game development event in which a topic is voted on by the community of entrants, who get to go to work after the subject is made public.) As such, the game can be easily completed within 10 minutes. The duration of the experience depends on how long you listen to Cootie's voice as her dialog is narrated (in a humorous style that I found to satire the stereotype of the innocent and easily excited anime girl) and if you get caught by baddies in the couple of moments in which it is actually possible to lose. Fortunately, there are no worries if the latter happens to you, as not much progress is discarded and you get to return in either the room you left off at or one close to it.

What makes Cootie Patootie a worthwhile investment of my 10-15 minutes (is my time truly so precious that I would suggest otherwise?) is that it genuinely creeps me out. The graphics may look like spur-of-the-moment MS Paint stuff, but the blacks and pinks and reds, in tandem with the skeletal style player character, combine with the mumblings of the inner Earth (they sound like alien groans) to genuinely make me feel unnerved. I'm a highly sensitive person to begin with, but even with that in mind, I find it impressive that a short game that frequently returns you to a comically sung title theme for the giggles can be an eerie experience without engulfing the player in jumpscares--or being a traditional horror game.