Quick Review: Dude, Stop

NEVAAAAH! Oh wait, it’s the game’s title.

A creation of Team Halfbeard, Dude, Stop was released on June 1st, 2018. You are the 17th tester hired by a dev to test the little puzzles in a game he’s designed. However, you will keep on messing with the poor guy’s plans by failing to conduct yourself the way he wants… by willingly screwing up.

The best part of the game: You can be as petty as possible.

Oh, a written test! I'm good at those.

As a dev, this guy should have known – playtesters exist to break a game and figure out what can go wrong in it, so that the devs can patch those holes. All the puzzles in this game can be beaten with both a correct and a wrong answer, and that’s part of the design for the game proper. However, the voiceover narrator, the unseen dev, who supposedly coded this whole thing, HAD to have programmed the wrong answers in, if they’re even possible in the first place! But that’s straying from the point. Besides, it’s a lot funnier to hear the Dev have a mental breakdown as you mess around with his project.

Green goes with green?
That's too intuitive for me.

The puzzles are split into packs, each containing a handful of shorter puzzles. Each pack has an “achievement” for finishing all of the puzzles correctly, and another for getting them all wrong. You have to finish each pack at least twice. The challenge, then, is to remember how to finish each smaller puzzle correctly and incorrectly, and do all puzzles in a pack right, and then wrong. On top of that, several packs also have smaller achievements for messing around for fun in the puzzles. To break the monotony, some packs are special; one is a written exam, in another the Dev is replaced by a tape cassette… My favorite pack is the one in which you’re given an inventory system and you can carry items between puzzles.

Hey, it's a cup. I'll take it.

An example in being able to mess up with a puzzle in a
spectacular way: Cutting a pizza into 11 slices.

Keep being a thorn in the Dev’s side; his responses will grow increasingly desperate as you progress through the 12 packs. If you annoy him long enough, he might even try to stop you from getting any more wrong answers… but then, what would be the point of, you know, "playtesting"????

So yes, there is a bit of a story to follow as you play through the game and its packs of puzzles, but really, it’s more fun to hear the Dev’s banter and mockery. Most puzzles are actually really easy. Some of them have either answer, right or wrong, that may be a little trickier to figure out; however the game is on the easy side overall. The graphics are pretty standard, and there is music here and there, though the focus of the game is on the Dev and his comments on what you do. After playing it a little longer, I think I would have loved to hear more unique comments any time you come up with particularly well thought-out ways to win or lose at some of the puzzles.

Do you know where your nephew's pictures go, Dev?
That's right - in the trash can!

It’s a pretty solid game; it’s not exactly challenging, but the laughs you’ll have from messing around with the Dev’s puzzles and hearing his cries of “Dude, stop!” (Ha! Title drop!) should more than make up for the easy difficulty. Dude, Stop is available on Steam for 15$ USD.