Citizen Makane

In the beginning, you thought it was a simple nightmare. But then it just didn’t stop.

You’re trapped in a text-adventure game called “The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane”.

Maybe this is your purgatory. Maybe you deserve this.

citizen makane by the reverend is an… odd beast.

let’s start with the game it’s referencing. the incredible erotic adventures of stiffy makane is real. it’s a very small game. there are four rooms, only two of which have any real point. there’s only a handful of things you can do. as you can imagine from the title, those things are all sex acts. there is a woman named pamela. each sex act you perform on her earns you points, and the game ends when you shoot her. if you’ve gotten the maximum score, you’re rewarded with the “STIFFY SECRET”: the capital of north dakota is bismarck.

it’s not good. poorly written and misogynistic down to the bones, there’s not much of a reason to think about it. despite that, it lingers in the interactive fiction community. for some reason, the character of stiffy makane has become an inside joke, with seven games featuring him included in the list “stiffy through the ages”.

i don’t really get the hype. passing around an eighth-grader’s poorly written smut makes me really uncomfortable, even if its author distributed it as an adult. building a mediocre mystery science theater episode around said smut is not my idea of a good time.

that brings us to citizen makane proper. the description suggests some sort of existential horror that isn’t borne out by the game itself. we only spend about five minutes in purgatory before pamela’s husband bursts in and tells the protagonist to wake up. he wakes in a hospital bed, is asked for his name, and chokes out the one thing he can think of: stiffy makane.

this is kind of a cool sequence, but it writes a check the rest of the game can’t cash. the backstory is a pretty typical “war of the genders” thing. the protagonist survived because he was cryogenically frozen, and he’s been thawed out for a research project that involves him having lots of sex. this is pretty cliche stuff.

i thought the game knew that. it has a good setup for metacommentary on the state of adult games. i was naive. the majority of the game is spent having deckbuilder sex with procedurally generated women. walk up and down the streets of urville, wait for women to talk to you, and then have sex with them.

and then do it a dozen more times, because you need the exp to level up, and you can’t beat the game until you hit level five.

i cannot stress enough how tedious and unpleasant the sex minigame is. whenever you play a card, it describes the act you perform in a way that’s meant to be humorous but just ends up gross. i would appreciate never having to read the phrase “sausage wallet” again.

the best ending has the protagonist say there’s more to life than sex. needless to say, this message does not land. citizen makane acts ashamed to be a porn game. for a sex comedy, it’s profoundly unsexy. one might call it “the marvel cinematic universe of sex.” it would’ve been way better if it had just committed to being pornography. once you claim you’re reaching beyond that, you open yourself up to a bunch of questions. for example:

• if this is meant to be a critique of the violent misogyny in the original stiffy makane, then…
  • …why does urville revolve around the only man in the world?
  • …why are most of the characters the player encounters interchangeable women to have sex with?
  • …why do you describe a woman’s vagina as a “badly packed kebab”?
• if i’m supposed to engage with this world seriously, then…
  • …why is everyone drinking human breast milk?
  • …where are all the lesbians?
  • …where are all the trans people?
• if i’m supposed to engage with the morality here…
  • …isn’t it kind of weird to thaw a guy out and tell him you’re gonna use him for sex research?
  • …why are “sex boss fights” treated as funny as opposed to horrifying?
    • note that one of these bosses is while you’re in a cave. she’s blocking the only exit.
  • …why is nobody remotely understanding when you shoot the person who’s trapped you in your mind so she can fuck you forever?
• if there’s more to life than sex, then…
  • …why are all of my quests sexual?
  • …why is sex magic the only sign of the supernatural?
  • …why isn’t any of that in the goddamn game?

overall: combines the erotic thrills of slay the spire with the emotional nuance & tactical depth of meet n’ fuck kingdom. hideously bioessentialist, and pondering the implications of its worldview left me genuinely sickened. not remotely worth it.