! (video game)
!, also known as Exclamation Mark! The Game, is a third-person RPG game made by Expected Expression Industries. It is a confusing mix of parkour, combat, and rhythm games.
The name ! stands for the negation operator, an open invitation for you to take control and rule the game world by negating anything in your way. The name also makes the game show up early and stand out in alphabetrical lists of games.
Characters[edit | edit source]
- The player, a neutral-looking standing object that is not well-optimized for lighting.
- The messenger, or the Mother of Worlds, a floating soul with glowing edges, translucent rendering, and ray-tracing supported lighting, for she is a gif file.
- Overseers of Game Manufacturing Line, Ltd. See below.
Story[edit | edit source]
“Long long ago, when elves and morae still inhabited the land, a little genie found a glowing gem in the Xxlqorgrf Mountains. That is unrelated to our mission today; now I give you a gun and a sword, and you will go outcool those corrupted colonizers of our holy land!”
Year 2222, a society with advanced technology, but still no flying cars. Game Manufacturing Line, Ltd. is a company that regularly pumps out cheap ripoff games, doing mass copy-paste with incredible efficiency. Before the events of the game, GML releases Forensic Fysics, a plagiarized version of another game, Physics Phrenzy.
This action draws the wrath of the gods. As fervent conneisseurs of tomatoes in Physics Phrenzy, they become godawfully spiteful for the lack of tomatoes in Forensic Fysics. They decide to send a messenger to choose someone to avenge their favorite game. Give 'em ire 'nd lud! Albeit in a convoluted proxy-by-proxy fashion. The messenger is the Mother of Worlds (although she was in the heaven customer service team), who chooses the player for always wearing a hoodie and looking trippy.
She projects her image on the player's retina and tells the story. After hearing about the atrocity, the player is boiling with anger and spoiling in flanger. They raise their fist in the air vowing to dunselbaff the ribitricious plagiarisers.
And so the adfentur begins, and the player was given two weapons for a classic hero.
Weapons[edit | edit source]
- The gun. It uses 6 BB bullets, which bypass the artificial-intelligence-powered protection grids (because BB bullets are bouncy and fruity), making it effective despite the reduced damage. The BB bullets are reusable, i.e. bullets remain in the world, can be picked up and shot again. This has both pros and cons. On one hand, when a bullet lodges into an enemy, the player has to get it out manually. On the other hand, there is basically an infinite bullet supply that can two-shot most lesser enemies.
- No, you cannot swing your mouse fast enough so that the bullet fires in an arc.
- The sword. It is a regular one-handed sword, more of the type used in plumbing than the standardized GRE equipment. The player can cleverly use the sword to conduct electricity and elegantly solve certain puzzles.
Progression[edit | edit source]
The player soon learns why the company could churn out ripoffs at such rapid rates. Almost all the employees and managers have been abstracted into classes and methods, which cause them to be disciplined and tireless; in addition, they still retain some human properties, such as flexibility and a limited self-repair ability.
Enthralled by the crimes against humanity, the player swears to destroy this evil facility. However, it soon becomes difficult to fight against many. In each fight, you have to figure out the workflow of the runtime-office by tracing the movement of data packets among the enemies. Then, perform a depth-first slaughter against the trojan-plagiarisers. That is, to deal with one manager, then recursively track down all his subordinates to kill, because a manager can regenerate (instantiate) his direct subordinates.
Bosses[edit | edit source]
Bosses are huge pigeons that hate tomatoes. They peck the tomato until they burst like a balloon full of Kool-Aid.
L'Artiste s'morte (The Lartist of deadly s'mores), C.O.O.[edit | edit source]
After a long struggle parkouring and parking across and above computers, the player gets to a door with "L'Artiste s'morte, C.O.O." scrawled across it. Hearing the pigeon's coo, the player seizes the chance to paralyze the hi-fi and puree the WiFi.
The door opens. The COO is playing bass casually. This is the company's π-th-highest-in-command the player is seeing, though he isn't managing at all. He plucks a chord and the player realizes that he is the source of those awful background music during battle sequences.
<L'Artiste s'morte> Here's something that I've been writing myself, this time in French! Goosé sexeux dé la very good-eux, la langué d'é oh no a tsunameux! <Player> I beg you, please don't. I'd like to disable the BGM already. <L'Artiste s'morte> You don't like music? Very well. My music has power. With that power, I'll tèar you into piêcès! <Player> ö
He brandishes the bass and prepares to fight. Just as the player realizes that it's made of steel instead of cotton balls, the COO casts the handle toward the player and blasts a beam at them. It fricking hurts.
The COO is immune to all projectiles, blocking shots with his bass guitar. When locked in melee combat, he also whirrs the bass flexibly. If the player stands far away and tries to knock him down with BB bullets, feel free to exchange fire with what is basically a handheld laser cannon. The COO uses the beam attack liberally, often destroying supportive structures in the walls and ceiling. While the player dodges the falling debris, the COO stands still, firm and confident among the settling dust. Until he gets hit by a girder and has his skull slightly deformed. Nevertheless, he keeps on fighting.
When his health is reduced to 50%, he will go colèretobenfuriamonnkronnbronnレイジアァアァアァマザーファッカー, disentangling his long hair which cascade down his face and cover one of his eyes. From now on, at any given moment, he can turn his bass guitar into an elastic bass fish, which can still shoot beams. This attack may take the player unaware because the fish can curve and swipe great areas with the beam. Although the fish deals lower damage than the bass guitar, the player must control the distance and predict the boss's moves with precision to win.
When his health reaches 0, he snaps his bass and performs himself a 3-dimensional Fourier transform, dissipating in the time domain. Here, if the player goes to the previous area and destroys some electronic devices, they can find a ifftinator to collect some of the COO's frequency info. The player can then summon a mini version of him as a sidekick when fighting other enemies. You can heal him by giving him s'mores, but there aren't any in the canon chapters.
Marketing Head, Moses of Objective OR-gates, M.O.O.[edit | edit source]
The last room on the second chapter is the employee enrichment center, consisting of a giant trampoline and a great mess of computers bouncing up and down. Navigating the room is a hellish experience, but it is possible to wait for two hours for the momentum of the bouncing machines to dissipate.
The dire mess is attributed to someone above. From a window up in the building, computers, spaghetti code, and data that goes labilabi are frequently thrown out, accompanied with enraged shouting throughout.
The player traces the labilabi data and reaches an open door with "Marketing Head, M.O.O." written on it. Timely, the second boss shows up and growls, "Marketing here, can I help you?"
No, Miss Head, totally no.
In the first phase, she is a hologram and has no hitbox. However, she can control the objects in her room, including a printing machine, a computer, and a football field. The printing machine is emitting a damaging blue smoke, and the computer is on the login interface. She says, "The computer is protected by a strong password. Nobody can crack it." Not being a l33t h4x0r, the player inputs the password on a post-it note attached to the display screen, and logs in successfully.
Fishal website[edit | edit source]
- www DOT exclamationmarkthegame DOT com
- www DOT exclaimationmarkthegame DOT com (redirects to the correct spelling)
