OH… SIR! THE INSULT SIMULATOR
Settle it with prefixes at dawn
Have you always dreamed of offending people, but never dared take it further than farting in a lift? You need an insult simulator. The idea behind Vile Monarch’s party game is a tiny bit like Cards Against Humanity: build an insulting, obnoxious, or downright bizarre statement1 from a pile of component parts. Said statement is then judged according to… some criteria or other, and then your opponent has the chance to do the same. Whoever constructs the most devastating insult from a pile of words in the middle of the screen wins.
It doesn’t work. Conceptually, I mean. While Oh… Sir! succeeds in realising its idea and delivering a perfectly functional, wellpresented2 title, that reality just isn’t fun to play. The problems are twofold: there’s simply not enough variety to the various insult chunks on offer to sustain more than a few rounds before the repetition sucks the fun dry, and the scoring system remains opaque long beyond that point.
Whether you play against humans (online or locally) or the AI, too often nonsensical constructions like ‘This conversation is your hat’ achieve reasonable scores, while simply repeating words time after time generates score multipliers. It’s as if the person in charge of adjudicating each battle is a primary schooler for whom saying ‘No, you are’ over and over again is the height of wit. You’re left ignoring funny or cutting insult possibilities as you try to appease the scoring gods with strings of gibberish, and that seems contrary to the spirit of the endeavour. Ultimately this is a game jam project spread too thinly over a full release. Phil Iwaniuk