IF Comp Review: 5 Minutes to Burn Something

[healyg]

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up first, it's Alex Butterfield's 5 Minutes to Burn Something!

5 Minutes to Burn Something! is pretty much your typical My Shitty Apartment game. Basically, you burned some toast, which set off your fire alarm, which automatically called the fire department, and the fire department doesn't look kindly on frivolous calls, so you need to actually burn something in the five minutes it takes for them to get here. (I'm thinking, wouldn't the fire department be more sympathetic about the smoke detector giving a false alarm like that? It's not like there's anything you could do to stop it, besides eating fruit that morning.)


In the early-going, it's not that bad, although it certainly isn't great; I found the start too overwhelming without hints, and the writing is more eager to be funny than it is actually funny. But then the puzzles, which I was expecting to pick up once you've gotten the run of the apartment, never got any easier, or better. And the mid-game implementation, when you start building the fire, is frustratingly bad. For example, there's an object under a (trying to avoid specific spoilers here) foo that, if you try to look for it by typing LOOK UNDER FOO, you get the standard Inform response "You find nothing of interest." Only with GET FOO can you find the thing.

In the late game you end up framing some guy, which, while stated to be a jerk, didn't seem to deserve being framed for arson. And the ending itself was just so treacly that it seemed to have wandered in from another game, one in which you didn't try to set your house on fire and frame someone else for it. I dunno, maybe there was some irony I'm not picking up on, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Conclusion: It has its moments, but 5 Minutes to Burn Something is not a good game. Avoid.