Quiver Dick’s Terrible Tale For Terrible Parents To Read To Their Equally Terrible Children is a visual novel made in the RPG Maker engine and as should be apparent by that mouthful of a title, is one that will not feature a serious premise by any means. We start off in a cozy little home with an old man about to tell a bedtime story to his grandkids. The problem is he doesn’t seem to know any and is quite the foul-mouthed individual, but he is determined to tell one nonetheless, making it up as he goes along. Also, spending quite a bit of time bickering with his equally terrible grandchildren, as well as letting us in on the deep lore of why he is named Quiver Dick.
After dicking around in seemingly unrelated plot setups, we are finally given control of our character named Mary… The Fairy. She finds herself in the house of a strange man that seems to want to eat her while she herself was there to steal food, even though fairies eat human flesh in this story for some reason. Failing in her attempt to steal whatever it was she was after, Mary returns to her fairy friends who have already dug up a corpse from the graveyard and consumed it already. Things escalate from there, ultimately ending up in Mary the Fairy being banished from this little fairy group, and is the start of her epic journey to do things and stuff.
Seemingly every few steps will see the grandkids chime in and get the old man rambling into completely unrelated outbursts. There is no pacing to speak of with things ramping up from 0 to 100 real fast as gramps half asses his storytelling and does as he pleases. Good old Quiver Dick is easily the star of the show here. Dude is hilarious in his senile attempts to make “hip” references or just being the personification of your average internet poster. He and his grandchildren are the main characters, everyone else including Mary the Fairy are pretty unremarkable.
Part of the issue is that the title, of only an hour length, does not give any other characters time to flesh out or even reappear. Shame as they are all actually memorable due to how weird everyone in this universe is. Given that telling a terrible tale is the entire premise of this low priced game, I’d say that is a quite the moot point, though it still felt like wasted potential for the band of degenerates you come across. If you haven’t garnered by now, this is not a title for younger gamers. There is nothing graphic shown, but the humor is pretty dark and more suited to the type of people that enjoy a lewd joke or two.
This is a solely story focuses affair. While you may occasionally be given control of Mary, it is a linear tromp from point A to point B. There is only a single ‘Simon Says’ like section that can count as gameplay. Most of what you can do is inspect the environments, which usually contains memes or references, and catch butterflies. There are six butterflies scattered throughout the game and gathering all six will give you one of three possible endings. They are really hard not to notice, and you’ll have to go out of your way not to pick them up if you want to see the other outcome.
You are given a single choice throughout that appears at the end of the game and diverts into the other two possible endings. They are nothing to write home about as you may expect from Quiver Dick and are largely the same. Overall, I enjoyed my time reading through all the random nonsense that the old man calls a story. It was a short, bewildering experience, but one that I will not soon forget. I laughed, I cried, and then I paused the movie I was watching to listen to Quiver Dick’s Terrible Tale. All jokes aside, for a dollar it is more than worth it to those scouring Steam for some quality crude humor.
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