Salamander County Public Television

Developer: Tinzone Games | Publisher: Tinzone Games | Release Date: 29 July 2022 | Genre: Action / Casual / Minigame Collection | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

Salamander County Public Television begins with the sort of workplace problem that probably was not covered during orientation. Almost everyone in Salamander County has mysteriously disappeared. Unfortunately, the local public television station still needs programming.

As its newest employee, you are promoted to the wonderfully vague position of Professional Thing-Doer and tasked with producing material for the station while your boss and remaining colleague attempt to figure out where the population went. What follows is a short collection of 25 increasingly ridiculous minigames connected by conversations, deliberately terrible television segments and a surprisingly persistent mystery. It’s incredibly daft, but fortunately it is also very funny.

Whether it works for everyone will depend almost entirely on their tolerance for absurdist humour, because Salamander County Public Television behaves like somebody assembled a public-access television station from stock photographs, text-to-speech voices and internet memes and then forgot to check whether any of it made sense. Almost the entire visual presentation is constructed from stock imagery. People are photographs awkwardly manipulated around the screen, animals appear where no reasonable animal should be, and bizarre videos interrupt the proceedings like adverts produced by somebody discovering editing software for the first time.

The actual gameplay also changes constantly. There are 25 minigames spread throughout the story, each with bronze, silver and gold medal targets. They rarely last more than a minute or two and generally introduce their own controls and objective before immediately sending players off to do something ridiculous.

One game requires stacking burger ingredients as high as possible while trying not to collapse the increasingly unstable tower. Another turns basketball backwards and asks players to manipulate the hoop rather than simply throwing the ball. Elsewhere players must vacuum pineapple pieces from pizza, inflate balloon animals to the correct size, guide a strangely proportioned mouse towards cheese and perform numerous other activities that make significantly less sense once written down.

That constant variety is easily the game’s biggest strength. We never knew what nonsense was going to appear next, and because each minigame is so short, even an idea that would never sustain an entire game can still be entertaining for sixty seconds. The downside is inevitable. Some minigames are considerably better than others. The best ones have an immediately understandable concept but enough precision or physics involved that chasing a better medal becomes genuinely entertaining. Burger stacking is a good example, because ingredient shapes and random placement force us to think about how stable the structure will remain.

Others feel more like one-off jokes than satisfying games. That is not disastrous when the campaign moves on so quickly, but it means the overall quality fluctuates noticeably. One challenge might have us immediately retrying for gold while the next leaves us perfectly happy to take whatever result we get and never touch it again. Fortunately, failure does not stop story progression. If players repeatedly struggle with an assignment, the game allows the day to be skipped, so even the weaker minigames cannot permanently block them from seeing the rest of the story.

There is considerably more incentive for completionists to improve their performances. The game features  achievements, with awards for earning bronze medals across each week, mastering weeks with gold medals, completing the entire set of assignments, and fulfilling specific bonus objectives. Steam leaderboards are also supported. This gives the game substantially more replay value than simply reaching the ending. Finishing the story only requires seeing the assignments through, but chasing gold medals means actually learning how the stranger games work and squeezing better scores out of them. Since some are much more enjoyable than others, whether players want to master all 25 will depend heavily on how much completion percentage matters to them.

The story between assignments is arguably just as important as the minigames. Conversations between the remaining station employees gradually develop the mystery of the vanished population while simultaneously producing increasingly stupid ideas for television programming. There are also videos and faux broadcasts scattered throughout, reinforcing the feeling that players are trapped inside a public-access channel operating on practically no budget.

The mystery itself never becomes particularly serious, and expecting some elaborate narrative payoff would probably miss the point. This is primarily a comedy built around escalating nonsense, including a surprisingly important mouse with enormous legs.

Visually, the reliance on stock photography gives the game an identity completely its own. Nothing looks conventionally impressive, yet replacing those badly cut-out photographs with polished character models would actively make the game worse. The awkwardness is part of the joke.

Sound follows the same philosophy. Synthetic voices, deliberately cheap broadcast-style presentation, and assorted sound effects contribute to the strange public-television atmosphere. It is not something we would listen to for its production values, but it fits the visual humour perfectly.

Controls vary from game to game, although each challenge remains simple enough to understand quickly. That accessibility matters because the entire appeal depends on throwing new ideas at players constantly rather than forcing them through lengthy tutorials.

The short runtime also works in its favour. The main story can comfortably be completed in only a few hours, which is enough time to experience all 25 games and the escalating absurdity without letting the joke wear completely thin.