Do Not Feed The Monkeys Or Else You'll Go Nuts
I didn’t entirely get it Do Not Feed The Monkeys at first as was hoping to see real monkeys, not the moron kind, but I persevered – more so to do with cleaning up my SD memory to accommodate my extensive library. Oooh… get me, girl.
Like Night Trap, the game has you watching monitor screens of unidentified people, and for a brief time, I was a little unsure if I could have stuck it out.
Sure, I have the patience for this sort of thing, but the convoluted opener into the game mechanics and plot confused me what I was supposed to do with this social experiment as you volunteer to monitor several members of society in their respective monkey cages.
Do Not Feed The Monkeys from Fictiorama Studios and Badland Publishing, is a management game by all accounts as you need to acquire an income to invest in the video cameras used for monitoring, their subsequent upgrades, but also to pay your way; rent, food – that sort of thing.
As an assumed human, your health will drop as the game time passes, as will your concentration levels and the need for sleep. To counter this, you eat and sleep, but you have a timer for when you are to submit your reports on your test subjects.
Cue part-time jobs such as dishwashing and dog walking that give you a little money to pay for your rent, order in some discounted pizza and improve your gear. While these jobs pay well, by leaving your apartment, you miss out on opportunities to evaluate your subjects, so you have to balance a mixture of food and hunger, people knocking on your apartment door, emails and phone calls.
Drawing comparisons to Night Trap once again, or perhaps Save Koch, you have to multitask in Do Not Feed The Monkeys, but be in the right place at the right time. With each monitor, events will take place in real-time, but you’ll get a light bulb flashing on the appropriate screen to indicate a point of interest. This happens for multiple screens, so you have to jump back and forth a lot.
What is it you do when watching these screens? Look for clues. Your subjects don’t know you’re watching them so will carry out their daily routines such as one person seen in an attic watching a celebrity from a distance, another, possible war criminal, having a candid conversation with a carer.
Conversations are text-based, and you can read these on-screen in real-time. Anything of interest will be highlighted in yellow, and you have to use the cursor to select it. This will be added to a mindmap-like scrapbook where you compile your findings and report back to your employers. If you’re accurate and deliver the information within the deadline, you’ll get a cash reward.
Other than the conversations, you can also interact with the objects on-screen for further clues then refer to your notes. From here you can make conclusions about the subjects such as their profession, name, address, motivations, while other screens are locations and you may have to locate a telephone number to call an expert on an area for more clues.
There’s so much to be paying attention to that it’s difficult to cover everything in a preview – especially as it was cut short. It’s a demo, after all. When my time was up, all I could think about was playing the demo again and again and forking out the cash to add to my list. But it’s not the money, it’s more the time factor, and I need to allocate a bit of ‘me time’ to see this out.
Bear with me, as once I get a ‘slot’, I’ll be reviewing this in full as Do Not Feed The Monkeys is a quirky title that has the right amount of depth. Using the process of elimination, it has you mildly deluded in thinking you’re a modern Sherlock Holmes who juggles dishwashing jobs while eating takeaway pizza.
One to watch.
