Your role in Scuttle Buggery is that of of a lowly beetle, trudging through a grimy, moth-infested world stitched together from burnt paper and rusty typewriter parts. Your burden is to find drops of oil and liquor near the discarded musty bottles from which they spew, and push them into the appropriate drains. The artwork is sumptuously detailed, perfectly matched to the music, full of decadent textures and decay. The liquid transparency effects are especially noteworthy, but everything, right down to the creepy flutter of a moth's wings, has been rendered with sickly beauty and realism.
A creative play on words gives this game a poetic name and purpose, while a poem at the beginning of the game gives it soul. And yet it's the haunting imagery of men of straw being eaten by a murder of ravenous crows, and then coming alive to thrash and swipe for their lives that gives this game its magic. A beautiful work of art disguised as an enjoyable game. Or is it the other way around?
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