For those who have followed along in my travels to the bottom of the Nintendo E-shop, I feel I owe a show of appreciation. You flew with me through ugly, drunk PSP worlds as a Kirkland brand Nicholas Cage Gangsta Mage. We braved dungeons to save the fair King King Lady Chris. This…game, dear nerds, is difficult to talk about. I certainly played Chex Quest. It is a difficult Doom clone. It is an incomprehensible concept akin to the unknowable creatures of madness that lie beyond the boundaries of space and time. It is really fuckin weird.
Chex Quest hit me in a way I’m sure it was designed to, or at least the successful result of whatever long ago ritual created this thing. It’s title and art promise action and adventure with a cast of anthropomorphic Chex Mix, which is a anime protagonist style beam of distilled impulse-buy directly to the brain.
In our story, a volcano erupts on an alien planet, sending rocks infested with little green eggs with eyes. When the eggs come into contact with nutritious food, they become creatures called Phlemoids. So, naturally, the galactic food people defense force calls in a crack team of Chex Mix ingredients to combat lifting loogie people. This is a remake. I wrote all of that up there and I’m not even an A.I.
The characters all look pretty cool if you like badass party mix. I picked the hulking pretzel man and began my quest. A flash of loading screen text tells me the controls, simultaneously killing much hype the game had out of the gate by pointing out the special moves. They’re usable only in multi-player modes and, not that I could put my finger on it, but I didn’t see myself playing this enough to get into online play. This renders the entire cast of quirky combatants functionally identical. Neat.
The gameplay is a combination of the worst parts of the Jedi Knights games exploration and a Doom clone created by a very sadistic and unimaginative snack enthusiast. There are two types of enemies that I saw. The first were snot people with aardvark noses that looked like Pac-Man ghosts covered in slime, and the second were just slightly jacked versions of enemy one with legs. Oh, and they shoot…something.
Your weapon is probably the most unsatisfying gun I’ve ever fired in a video game. It is a weird zapper thing that never feels good, has weird lag, does shit damage and is the only option I saw for many levels. Your only other option is the spoon, this game’s version of the knife. Ha. Ha. Ha. Chex. Spoon? Get it? It too does shit damage and feels as solid as a high five from a ghost mucus person.
Its very much like Wilfenstien and Doom in that the old “enter room ~> shoot enemies~>hit switch~> enemies enter~> shoot enemies” is it’s core gameplay loop. To my knowledge, that’s it’s only gameplay loop, because after the wackiness wore off, I found myself getting wrecked by room after room of swarms of snot people. Thrust from the jaws of one killzone to the next. Ammo is sparse for your shitty phaser beam.
Too much had been enough. I guess the sentient Chex Mix will have to learn to coexist with the mucus people. A bridge, drawn together by a bond between two parties ensuring I never want to eat Chex Mix again. Did I just play an HD remake of the worst commercial ever made? What just happened? I need to play something else. Where the HD remake of Burger King sneaking game, eh?
Chex Quest property of Qubic Games and Digital Café.
