Official Score
Overall - 10%
10%
There Is A Genie In My Szechuan Sauce is one of those "ironic" meme games in which people gush about it on Steam and tell their friends about how it's "so bad it's good." However, the joke is on you if you play this poorly acted, poorly constructed mess of a game.
Full motion video games might be deader than the SEGA CD, but meme-based games seem to be all the rage on Steam these days. Riding the coattails of the ever-popular Rick and Morty, Bmc Studio’s There Is A Genie In My Szechuan Sauce is based around a one-note joke from the show.
Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.
There Is A Genie In My Szechuan Sauce Review
The action of this game was more or less recorded on an iPhone camera at somebody’s house, complete with poor lighting. Players watch idly as Jeff’s friend Paul discovers that he has the Szechuan dipping sauce, which is just regular sauce with a poorly written post-it note on it. Opening it causes a genie to come out, which bears fidget-spinner glasses and a “Make America Great Again” hat. These two lucky souls get four (not three) wishes to do whatever they want and…that’s it. That’s the whole game. The entirety of this title will run you 10 minutes, and ends anticlimactically.
If this simple plot was hard to understand, it becomes even more broken when factoring in the cinematography present here. Jump cuts, sound distortion, bad camera angles, blurry lenses, and copious amounts of yelling are downright unpleasant. You get the feeling that everybody in this game is just muttering their lines, and you can clearly see that they’re reading this terrible script at key moments. It often feels like everybody will just break into laughter as just how ridiculous and bad that this all is. People will also break into dance for some reason, or dab just for the heck of it. To top things off, props are downright junky – apparently they can’t even afford wigs.
To play this incredibly short game, players must choose between one of two poorly-written options, often revolving around one of the wishes you can make. However, this game is more on-rails than the Transcontinental Railroad. Choosing the wrong choice will more or less have the game tell you to try again, bringing you back to the previous menu. There are only around five choices to choose from, so it’s not like your choices really matter.
There Is A Genie In My Szechuan Sauce is one of those “ironic” meme games in which people gush about it on Steam and tell their friends about how it’s “so bad it’s good.” However, the joke is on you if you play this poorly acted, poorly constructed mess of a game.
