I knew I wanted to play Agatha Knife the second I started watching the trailer. The game's main character loves animals, but she also loves meat. I can totally relate! Agatha lives in her mother's butcher shop, and she hangs our and plays with the animals there. She also kills them. The animals aren't massively keen on that part, though. Who woulda thunk?
So Agatha does what any reasonable person would do and creates Carnivorism, a religion, which teaches animals that dying in order to become meat will lead them to absolute and eternal happiness.
I actually kinda like how religion is depicted in this game. There's this elderly couple in a church, which spends a lot of money on candles made out of cheese, because that way the Time Lord will forgive them their sins and grant these oldiewonks eternal life (after death). Of course the Time Lord doesn't exist and that whole religion was made up by some guy with a failing cheese factory, who is finally turning a profit again, now that people believe that all of their sins will be forgiven if they purchase enough cheese. Everybody wins - the oldies have something to believe in, the cheese guy rakes in the cash, everyone is happy. The characters clearly state that all deities and religions are made up. It's a tool to control and manipulate people. Sure, that's rather cynical, but personally, I find it difficult to disagree.
The game repeatedly surprised me with how dark it is. There's this veterinary clinic in town, which houses the saddest, most miserable cats, dogs, lizards and ferrets you'll ever see. It's a depressing sight, but as Agatha remarks, "Oh well. The vet is going to make them all better." Yeah, about that...
Halfway through the game you learn that the vet has a deal with the local supermarkets and restaurants and he's actually selling off unwanted pets as meat. People take their animals to his clinic, ask for them to be fixed, then change their minds when they learn how expensive proper treatment would be and just abandon their animals. And let's be honest, people abandon their pets for much pettier reasons in real life, so this isn't exactly far-fetched.
What's worse, when you go and tell people that the local stores are selling dog meat, most people simply don't give a shit. "So what? It tastes alright and it's cheap." And is that really so surprising? Lots of people buy discount meat, which costs next to nothing. The animals are treated like absolute crap, stuffed with hormones and other garbage, but the meat is cheap, so what the hey. And sure, there was a certain amount of outrage when it turned out that lasagne sold by Findus actually contained horse meat instead of beef, but most people were really just angry about the deception, not the fact they're eating horse. That's still quite a step away from eating a cat or a dog in our culture, but if the price is right, I can see a certain amount of people being okay with it.
Then there's Agatha's best friend Nika, who sparks her creativity with the power of hard liquor, which is a bit of an unusual hobby for an elementary school kid. Nika's mother has basically lost all brain activity with the help of daytime reality TV. There's a widower, who turned his deceased wife into a stew and ate her with his now traumatized son. That's a subject, which comes up a lot in this game - why is it okay to eat a pig or a cow, but you're a horrible monster if you eat a dog or a person? It doesn't really give any answers, beyond Agatha's opinion that some animals are for eating and others are not. Not the most satisfying answer and that's okay. I'm not sure there is a good answer to this kind of question.
I really enjoyed playing this game. The writing is clever, the humour is dark, it's a fun, nice little snack to play on the sofa or on the go. Granted, many of the puzzles aren't challenging at all, there's waaaayyyyy too much fed-exing and padding involved and the two biggest puzzles are more annoying and stupid to figure out than they have any right to be. But I can forgive all that in a fun little budget game. What really bothered me, though, is this utterly stupid plot-hole.
Somewhere around the second half of the game, Agatha heads to the zoo, because there's a machine collecting dust there, which can turn animals into mincemeat, which would allow Agatha to make those 2000 hamburgers a day, which a local restaurant ordered from her butcher shop. Wanna know why the owner of the zoo no longer uses the machine? Because she invented another machine, which can CREATE ANY MEAL OUT OF THIN AIR! That's literally how they describe it. You just feed the machine a recipe and it will materialize the dish from random molecules in the air. Because science. And Agatha is all, "Okay, cool, can I have the mincemeat machine now?"
What in the ass?
Let me repeat this one more time: there's a machine, which creates food out of air! Without hurting or killing anyone! The entire game is about Agatha not wanting to scare her animals when she has to kill them for meat! The answer is RIGHT THERE and she just shrugs it off, goes through the ordeal of inventing a religion, literally drugging a pig and brainwashing it into agreeing to get butchered in front of all the other animals in some ritual, then turning every single one of her beloved animals into hamburgers.
With this machine she wouldn't have to do any of that, she could stop actual cats and dogs getting slaughtered for cheap meat AND she could also fix plothole #2: all the animals she turns into burgers at the end of the game are stolen and nobody seems to care.
You see, the animals for the big showdown ceremony all come from the farm where Agatha and her mother used to buy their critters for the butcher shop. Problem is, the butcher shop is no longer making money and they can't afford any more animals. So Agatha just goes to the farm, talks to the animals and coerces them to come to the butcher shop by their own volition. Because, you know, if I come to your house and make your dog follow me home, it's perfectly legal and there's nothing you can do to get it back. And sure, the game ends with their shop selling lots of hamburgers and paying off all their debt and nobody seems to mind that they've suddenly got a ton of meat while their former #1 supplier has lost every last one of their animals over night. Wonder how they would have explained that one, had they bothered to get into this at all.
I'm guessing there are about five other people who bought this game and nobody is ever gonna read any of this shit. But damn, this annoys me! Yeah, sure, maybe Agatha didn't want that magic wonder machine, because it would jeopardize her butcher shop and the entire industry. Or maybe she would have accepted that sacrifice for the sake of the animals she loves so much. Of course there's no way we'll ever know now, because in the actual game, she barely acknoledges that invention's existence. So we get to butcher a pig in front of a live audience of hundreds of animals, who all want to become meat in order to experience eternal happiness. Woo! :D
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