Gaming Professor Archive: 2019
Salutations students, it's the Gaming Professor here! Welcome back to the only classroom where the curriculum is gaming! Class is in session for… YIIK!
This befuddling little gem of an indie game is nothing short of awesome sauce!! I’d characterize it as two spoons of great combat, another two of amazing dialogue, topped with a pinch of Dark Souls and absolutely smothered in nostalgia overload. Mix it all together with amazing RPG parry porn and some Parappa style rhythm game segments and cook to perfection… Oh wait, it already is perfection!
But why’d I call it befuddling? Well, it can’t all be perfect. Do you see this mustachioed ginger gentleman gracing us with his graceful grimace on the boxart? Yeah, I think that’s actually a pretty mean stereotype of a retro gamer. We don’t all wear glasses and flannels, that’s such a cliche. At least he has lots of funny quips and his death in act five is really something to behold.
And on that topic, the story is so amazing! It’s a little bit like Homer’s The Odyssey, except it's set in 2000 and all of the characters are way funnier. Alex is just like any ordinary gamer such as myself, except he harbors a dark secret that I won’t reveal. Anyways, when he ends up going into an alternate universe in the internet world, everything is turned upside down! While he adventures through the world of YIIK, his wife in the overworld fights off the advances of many suitors who would take her from Alex. And who could blame them? Talk about milf mania!
My favorite part of the game was when Alex went into the Reddit world and got to explore all the different Subreddits (Of course, they are called Bluedits and Subbluedits in this game. What a beautifully subtle and yet hilarious reference for us nerds!) and he met all of those gorgeous babes in r/jeansspanking! Oh man, if that were me I would never leave…
Calculating a score for this indie retro throwback masterpiece wasn’t difficult, even if it has some harmful stereotypes of gamers. Not to mention, I wasn’t too thrilled about the apple bobbing segments. I wish they had made the timing more consistent, but hey this game was made by just three people in Belgium. For that reason alone, YIIK is so wildly impressive! B+
