All You Can Eat - Review: Not a challenge to readers over Christmas

Price: £1.49 / $1.99 on Steam

Reviewed On: PC / Laptop 1

Review

So this is a difficult one to review and also to be fair to the game. I hope those reading this will understand the dilemma once they've read all of the review.

All You Can Eat is a point and click adventure game with the quite unique idea of doing the whole thing in the style of a comic strip. That also means any actions you try are played out in comic book panels which while they remove the need for animation it also means a large number of panels of comic book art having to be created including for hints when you're almost right or just random weird things you might try to do. The second gimmick being that when you finish the game you can have your actions and path through the game printed out as a comic book to keep.

Plot wise the game verges into both surrealist and topical humour though often using broad archetype characters and them being caricatures as part of the humour E.G. yes the big corporate boss is an evil corporate boss whose doing illegal things.

The story has sees you trying to save the all you can eat diner where you now also live for various reason from the evil giant corporation that is trying to foreclose on it. Along the way you'll have to interact with an array of different characters along with using and combining items to solves the various puzzles.

I will say I was also kind of impressed by the range of options, though I'm pretty sure as the game is black and white that colour blind mode is a little meta joke.

The game took me about 40 minutes to complete and that was with messing around and another issue. The other issue being that the game set off my Anti-virus for suspicious activity and initially caused the whole game to be moved to quarantine. This isn't the developers fault for the most (at least from my limited understanding it's not as there's far easier ways than making a full game and selling it on Steam to infect people) this is a false positive due to IDP.ALEXA.51 and certain antivirus programs picking up such activity as a warning sign of a possible virus or infected file. It should be noted that some major big budget games have been running into similar issues too due to this so it's not just an indie dev managing to put their foot in it.

Now I said for the most part it's not the developers fault, however they still have to take a tiny amount of the blame because (and I'm no expert on this) part of the issue is how the comic printing option is designed to work with the game taking a HTML file created while playing and passing it through a system to convert it to a PDF. The problem is certain malicious software relies upon automated systems to open HTML addresses to perform actions such as trying to open connections or download additional software to the machine without the user realising, the likely cause of the false positive is the game directing a system to open a HTML file to convert it to create the PDF. So I'd say it should be considered an oversight by the developers and I hope going forward they'll either make it so the HTML file can just be opened and a PDF made from they by the user or fine another method to do it which likely won't set off certain Anti virus programs.

Verdict:

40 minutes, maybe a little more if you go back to find absolutely everything the game has to offer is quite short and it must be said that the anti-virus problem though it won't impact everyone it will impact some and that can break the comic printing too so it is a problem.

However the short length and technical issue don't stop it being a silly little fun game with some innovative ideas on how to do point and click games and I go a few chuckles from some of its humour.  

It's also very well made other than the one technical issue so the quality and clear work, passion and ingenuity that's been put into the design of All You Can Eat means it's not a waste of your time or money really to try. Just be warned if you use anything in the Avast family of Anti viruses you might have some issues with false positives and I hope the develop (if they're reading this) submits their game and files to the Avast security research team to get them officially whitelisted or finds a way round the false positive issue.  

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