The Rutabega

Introduction:

It’s been a while, I won’t lie. Midterms sucked up most of my time, but now that they’re over with, it’s time for more reviews. This time, I’ll be reviewing “Rutabega”, a visual short story about rutabagas. So what about the spelling? People take artistic licenses with spelling all the time. If Jacquie Peterson, the authoress, wants rutabagas to be “rutabegas”, then she can go right ahead. I mean, look at her name. It’s Jacquie, not Jackie, and it’s “rutabega”, not rutabaga.

I found the game on the LemmaSoft Forums in a very unassuming thread. Two lines of text, no pictures, no heavy description. There wasn’t much of a push for me to try the game, but I’m doing it anyway. Even The Rutabega’s website doesn’t explain what it could be. All you’ve got on the website is a slight tip-off of what the story may be about and that’s a picture of the highly disturbing vegetable.

The Rutabega starts with a pink menu featuring the words “a sad tale”. Interesting.

Story:

The story is about a new teacher to a school, a young Miss Reilly. To her surprise, her class’s pet actually isn’t a pet. It’s… It’s… Oh, God. It’s too shocking for words. It’s scary. It’s vomit-inducing. It’s something freaky. I… I can’t find the words to type. All I can type is that the story is EXTREMELY short. I wish the writer had done more with it, like having the kids intervene before the teacher can do *that* to the pet and the teacher trying to show what the pet really is through several school weeks or something.

It could’ve been a cute little game of convincing the kids that their pet isn’t exactly a pet. Unfortunately, it’s three minutes (maybe two, I don’t know) too short to offer a grand plot. For what it was, though, it worked in a brief sort of way.

Music\SFX:

N\A. It’s quiet…too quiet…

Graphics:

All those pictures were from Morguefile, am I right? Every picture is a photo of a “real” thing, so no drawn graphics here. The problems I found with the graphics were that the classroom picture wasn’t big enough to cover the whole screen. There’s a black border all around it because it doesn’t fit. When I hold down “CTRL” to skip what I’ve already read, I can see the former scene’s picture behind it. To fix this issue, just make the classroom picture larger.

A uniform image size for the pictures of the kids, teacher, and principal would’ve been better. Seeing one picture with a thick border and another with a thin border can make things look a little on the messy side.

Other:

Not much else to say. The game’s pretty plain all around. And hey, kids have had pet rocks before, I don’t see what was so wrong with that “thing” they had. Heh. It’s kinetic, no choices.

In Closing:

When the writer writes that it’s a short story, she means it’s a short, short story. Download it in its discussion thread here.