Marketplace trends are one of the most fascinating aspects of the video game industry. Games like Call of Duty are berated in online message boards for being unoriginal, yet they continue to stay at the top of sales charts. There are also unique little gems like Minecraft that explode onto the scene and take everyone by storm.
It all starts when someone makes a unique game in their basement. This original masterpiece has never been seen before and it is rewarded with buzz, hype and goodwill. Within the next few years, game designers influenced by these masterpieces attempt to capture their own lightning in a bottle, leading to market saturation and causing gamers to pine for the next big thing.
In recent years, YouTube and Twitch streamers have latched onto QWOP, Mount Your Friends, Surgeon Simulator, and Octodad to create the trend of the physics-based tech demo. These games had minimalist graphics, lacked a story, and could barely be called a game. They worked like tech demos for the physics engine the developers were creating. Content creators began streaming these broken, ugly games in order to give viewers a few laughs at the chaos that ensued. The subject of this review, Soda Drinker Pro, is another game that follows the conventions of this trend.
I know I am already on paragraph four and I haven’t even told you about Soda Drinker Pro, a game from developer Will Brierly. That is because you need to understand where this game went wrong. Soda Drinker Pro is pandering to a specific audience, and that fact severely hurts it. Make sure you keep reading until paragraph eight.
Soda Drinker Pro was developed in one day in 2008. Let that sink in for a second. A game made in one day, eight years ago, is now being released on the Xbox One. The graphics, user interface, level design, and physics engine all look like relics of the Nintendo 64 era. Each level begins with you standing in a giant cubic room. You move at a snail’s pace to try and collect bonus sodas throughout the environment. The walls were made in Microsoft Paint and there are no textures in any of the environments.
That is the entire game. There are 102 levels of the exact same thing. The background music is uninspired and has a strange voice-over of a guy on repeat that keeps mumbling about how soda is awesome. The game is weird, and not in a unique Portland, Oregon kind of way.
You beat Soda Drinker Pro by holding down both triggers at the start of the level. That’s it. You do not have to collect the bonus sodas, you do not even have to take a single step. You just stand still, hold both triggers, and you will consume your soda. When you finish your soda, you finish the level. This is neither inspired nor unique; this is boring and disrespectful to a player’s time. The developer created a game that has absolutely no point and charged gamers for it.
At this point, I expect most people have stopped reading this review because they realized where it was going. I did this to mirror the setup of this game. In level two, there is a house painted on a wall. There is nothing at all in the level to signify that this house is special in any way. But if you walk through the door of the house, you find the “real” game. The developer actually told me to walk into the house, otherwise I would miss it. Why would you hide the real game? Why even have the terrible Soda Drinker Pro at all?
Inside the house is a minigame suite called Vivian Clark. These minigames are a stark contrast to Soda Drinker Pro. The art is beautiful, inspired, imaginative and truly unique. Everything has a very dreamlike, or acid-induced, look to it. The characters are paper cutouts that move around in different 2D and 3D landscapes. Sometime you find yourself in space, or on a waterslide, or under water. The environments are gorgeous and the music flows to create a solid experience. Again, why would you hide this?
Each individual game follows a path to an eventual end point. The end point is not revealed until you buy all of the book pages from the shopkeeper with the crystals you collect throughout the various games. The games are very unforgiving and take multiple try and fail cycles; they reward patience. At first I thought this portion of the game was also a broken mess, but then I realized I was just playing poorly and needed to really dive into each game. There are multiple ways to retry stages or teleport to new stages and it takes a while to really understand the incredibly deep mechanics.
Summary
I understand that the developer may have wanted to showcase this silly game called Soda Drinker Pro that he made so long ago. But hiding the awesome Vivian Clark inside of an indistinguishable house in level two was not the way to do it. It feels more like Soda Drinker Pro is made for annoying YouTubers to yell at and drive a few extra sales. It is sad to think that the developer did not have enough faith in Vivian Clark to allow it to shine on its own without being trapped in a gimmick. Many gamers will skip right by the house and be left wondering why anyone cared about a game with decade-old graphics, deplorable controls and pointless gameplay.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.