Merrily Perilly

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Misc.

Players: 1

.

Review:

Merrily Perilly, released on PC in 2018 and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is an odd game. Probably the closest thing I could compare it to would be a Graphic Adventure, but that doesn’t quite describe the sort of gameplay here. In this game, players take the role of a man who wanders into a town suffering from dehydration, desperately seeking something to alleviate his ailment before it becomes fatal. However, he has the unfortunate poor luck that any solution he finds only inflicts him with another, equally serious ailment.

Drinking from the fountain could resolve dehydration, but get you bitten by a poisonous snake. Going to the hospital could get you medication to cure the poison, with a side effect of diarrhea. Using a porta-potty could relieve the diarrhea, but leave you dehydrated again. And so it goes, with players scrambling from one place to another, trying to find some semblance of peace amidst all of the dangers you face.

As you run around, you’ll be contending with a timer constantly ticking down, which is only reset when you replace one malady with another. Because of this, players aren’t given much freedom to explore or stop and think about solutions they haven’t tried yet, which leads to much of players’ actions either being aimless, or resulting in them going in an endless cycle from one malady to the next while they try to buy themselves some time. This really detracts from the potential fun this game could provide, and I really feel like a difficulty selector would have been wise to include here, so players could take the game at their own pace.

While the premise seems like it would be a great source of amusement, it doesn’t really work out that way. Most of the afflictions you’ll collect are fairly straightforward rather than strange and humorous, the people you talk to are blunt and not especially funny in their responses, and the game’s simple pixel art visuals and synthesized piano soundtrack might hint at humor present in the game’s premise, but it doesn’t really lead to the game actually being funny.

Unfortunately, this means that Merrily Perilly isn’t especially fun to play, and doesn’t use its premise to make for a particularly amusing presentation. And while I admire the creativity of this game’s premise, Merrily Perilly doesn’t really do enough with that premise to keep the player’s interest unless they are absolutely determined to try every possibility present here. For most players, this game simply isn’t worth the effort.

tl;dr – Merrily Perilly is a game that has players rushing to try and remedy one life-threatening condition after another. While the premise is amusing, the way players must always contend with a short timer discourages critical thinking and exploration, and the presentation isn’t engaging or funny enough to keep you wanting to play. As a result, this game just doesn’t live up to that great premise.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are MB, Andy Miller, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Exlene, Eli Goodman, Ilya Zverev, Stov, Connor Armstrong, and K.H. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}