Meat-Shield: Wanted
Best played with headphones! :)
Play as a celebrity bodyguard and protect the person and image of young billionaire 'Jeremiah Connors', helping him to become the most famous person in the world! Follow Jeremiah in this comedic text-based adventure and help him advance his celebrity career while avoiding cancellation at all costs! Join him as he becomes a rock-star, a comedian and even... a king?! As well as many other career paths!
Your decisions during the game's specific scenarios, made quickly under pressure, will determine and influence how Jeremiah's quest will progress! Will you make him more popular, less popular or neither? How will people react online to you punching a guy in the face? How will they react to you not punching a guy in the face? How about when Jeremiah makes a joke? The lines between what is considered a 'right' or 'wrong' choice are completely blurred, making your navigation through this absurd world far more difficult than perhaps first thought.
This goofy and over-the-top Twine game satirizes modern day celebrity and online culture, challenging the notion of 'political correctness' to its core.
Includes:
-Lengthy 'choose-your-adventure-like' Twine game.
-6 playable in-game days (including the prologue), each of which providing unique scenarios and character interactions.
-Two distinct paths (Route A and Route B), which players can swap between throughout the game depending on their end scores on each in-game day. Ending a day with a positive (+) score will take players along Route A while ending with a neutral (0) score will take them to Route B. However, ending with a negative score (-) will result in cancellation (forcing players to restart the day).
-Interactive in-game 'Twit'r' app that allows players to keep track of what Jeremiah's current social status score is and to see what ridiculous posts people are making in response to each of your decisions.
-Two alternate endings.
-Extra optional collectibles, providing players with information that can help inform their choices in future scenarios.
Development log
- More significant update + new contentOct 10, 2021
- Minor updates and fixesOct 07, 2020
Comments
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Took me a while but I played through a single full play-through of the game and loved it. I really appreciated the simplicity of the writing and design, with a closer focus on the 'gameplay' and the fun of playing it rather than going overboard with deep and complex lore and narratives. That being said; the underlying theme and point of the game's story was entertaining and made me rethink my own perspective on current events. The ridiculous humour (which is a varied mix of visual, written and audio humour) also conveyed all of this, for the most part, fairly well but maybe some people might disagree idk.
It all acts mostly as a character study of the caricature of Jeremiah who is someone I slowly grew to 'love to hate' and I mean that in the best possible way haha. I also really liked the different paths you can go down as it opens up decent replay-ability--however--I think having more dialogue options for the normal conversations would make this stronger and feel less linear. The abrupt ending was surprisingly effective for a game like this, although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for a tad bit more. I loved the unique hand-drawn art style especially the drawings of Jeremiah's different forms. I felt that the timer could do with a couple of added seconds but maybe I'm just slow? LOL xD.
TL;dr: A very enjoyable game with a very hyperbolic nature that highlights fairly well our at times ridiculous worship of celebrities and other social issues. Some small errors here and there could do with being ironed out as well as some additions that would make multiple play-throughs even more unique. I would definitely recommend this to anyone and everyone, good job!. 4/5.
Hello! Thank you so much for playing my game! I had planned to have more dialogue options originally but sadly had to scrap most of it due to needing to meet a deadline for a uni hand-in. I plan on revisiting this project at some point and make it even better. People's feedback will be vital for this, so I cannot stress how much I appreciate you not only giving my game a chance but also for providing your honest thoughts. Words also cannot describe how much your high praise means to me as well, I know that it's not perfect but knowing that it has brought such enjoyment to people other than myself has made it so much more worth it. :)
I got up to the Shakespearean Costume and I had to take a breather. I didn't see a lot of radical rhetoric pertaining to that peculiarly modern disease called "political correctness", outside of a fictional conspiracy theory in the subplot in the background, which led me to suppose that the matter was not handled in any measure of depth. The language was difficult to follow at times, in part because merging British English with Youth Slang and Internet Shorthand upset too many of my expectations for formal prose. Be that all as it may, I intend to revisit this at a later convenience.
Regards. R.G.
Hello! Thanks for playing my game and commenting! My aim when making this game was to make an over-the-top yet tongue-and-cheek game that is primarily focused on the quick decison making during comedic scenarios, while exploring an underlying theme of modern day celebrity and cancel culture. I felt that using too much radical rhetoric to explore this theme would have made the game too serious to the point where it would likely alienate some people. Because of the unserious nature of a game like this, I felt that using formal language/prose just didn't make sense in my opinion, especially for a character like Jeremiah Connors, and I am unsure as to why that was expected? However, I am completly open to be being wrong and changing my mind on these points. I do plan on revisting this project at some point to make improvements, edits and additions meaning that your feedback and anyone else's will be invaluable. I do also hope that there was perhaps something that you had enjoyed about the game to get so far through it? ;)
Jokes aside, thank you so much for giving my first ever game a try and providing your honest thoughts, you my good sir/madam are an absolute legend! :)
That was very eloquently stated, Scott. Yes: I was intrigued by the minimalistic approach to design; I must often resort to simplicity in developing my own narrative games. I may very well return to play at greater length. I must suppose that my head was starting to ache from all of the millennial slang, so an occasional bout of formality would have offered me respite. Be that as it may, while not all games must be silly, neither mustn't they.
Rinzai.
Absolute slap of a game. Played it at least 5 times.
Whoever did the music is an absolute dollop of a mint cake.
Writing amazing, cry laughed at points.
Well thought out game.
★★★★★