Developer: Ben Pettengill
Publisher: Ben Pettengill
Year: 2001
Genre: Adventure Game

My playthrough of the Reality-on-the-Norm series continues. I tried to get the 2nd game working but wasn’t able to so I gave up and moved ahead to the third game. It doesn’t matter too much since they’re all standalone games that make references to previous games, but that’s it.

This one has you once again playing as teen magician Davy Jones. His magical ring has been stolen by Russian spies and it’s up to you to get it back. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. It’s not as good as the first one in my opinion but is still alright enough. It’s more immature than the first game and there’s some humor in it that hasn’t aged great, although neither game has aged as poorly as I expected, given that it was made by people in their teens or early 20s in the early 2000’s, so that’s been a nice surprise. It’s hard for me to be that critical of them since it’s such a weird project and people are also figuring out how to use the engine. So far each game has had a different project setup too.

As you can see in the above screenshot, there’s some weird perspective stuff going on in the MS Paint art, but I think that’s actually kind of the charm for me. I really enjoy that the art isn’t polished but also isn’t just trying to emulate The Secret of Monkey Island or King’s Quest. I have a lot of nostalgia for this era of adventure games, where the community decided to make their own games since Lucasarts and Sierra stopped making them, and had to figure out how to do that. Like I said with the first game, it’s hard to recommend specific 15 minute games, especially ones in the middle of a shared universe, but it is fun going through this series if you can get the games to work.

The Soviet Union Strikes Again! is available for free on the Reality-On-the-Norm website.