Exploring The Weird World Of Steam's Meme Game Community: Part 2

It's a strange moment when you realize just how many people are out there right now coding video games based on memes. What's even stranger is realizing that some of these are legitimately interesting, well-made games, while also being genuinely funny memes themselves.

After diving into just a few of the meme-based video games in Steam's catalog last month and finding myself pleasantly surprised at a few, it was obvious there was more to explore here. If you want to take your meme experience from simple image macros and video edits to a fully immersive gaming experience, but don't want to wade through the low-effort cash-grabs, look no further as we determine whether or not four more meme games are worth your time and money.

Memetyper

Memetyper is pretty much exactly what you'd imagine it to be. It's a typing video game based on memes. When you start the first level, you'll see a meme and the name of that meme (or a caption you might see associated with the meme) underneath it. Your task is to type out the words shown as fast as possible without making any mistakes. Three mistakes and you lose, having to restart the stage. It's like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing but with more Rage Comics and less variety.

Each stage consists of two to five memes, and there are 20 stages. You can easily finish the core game in about an hour, even if you're not the fastest typist. Luckily a survival mode unlocks after the core game, which gives you infinite memes to type out. Each time you complete a stage, the memes you've typed are added to an in-game "Meme Encyclopedia," which briefly describes how the meme is used and its origins in a very … familiar way. Too familiar, in fact. It seems that just about every meme description is a direct copy-paste from the relevant Know Your Meme page, as well as the images used in the entries. Just compare our entry for My Body Is Ready to the image below and you'll see the light.

So, that's kind of not cool, but also, it is what it is. The game works as it should, and if you're in the market for a meme-based typing game, well, this one will certainly do. Just don't expect the most up-to-date memes or very much originality.

The Backrooms Game

With Spooktober upon us, let's look at a spooky meme game. There are multiple games based on the creepypasta-turned-meme The Backrooms, but I selected the free one because it's free. In this game, you travel through a randomly generated series of hallways and open doors that look just like the location depicted in The Backrooms meme. The first thing you notice is just how well they've managed to recreate the setting and feel of the image. Even the carpets look moist and smelly, as described in the creepypasta.

The objective is to escape the backrooms while avoiding a tall, black monster, sort of like Slender Man but with a less defined shape. The game is also like Slender: The Eight Pages but without any collection aspect. The exit can be any random wall in the game, making it very hard to find at times. Your character will slowly go insane throughout the course of your playthrough, but you can combat that by looking at your watch every 30 seconds. However, checking your watch too often makes you more insane, meaning you really have to try and time those checks. It's a cool, original mechanic that keeps the game interesting.

For a free game, the graphics, design, gameplay and even creature are top-notch. The developers have done a great job recreating the meme and keeping that spooky tone, showing a lot of heart. One of the coolest parts of the game is when you start to go insane and the textures on the carpet and walls start moving. This a great meme-based game to play around Halloween.

Filthy Frank Kart

Of all the games I looked at this week, I had the highest hopes for Filthy Frank Kart. Essentially, it's a remade version of Mario Kart, but everything is themed after Filthy Frank lore.

From the second you boot up the game, things seem hopeful, as a chiptune version of Pink Guy's "STFU" serenades your ears. Then you get to the character select screen and things are even more inspiring. There are 30 characters to choose from, all featuring awesome sprite work. The roster includes characters like Pink Guy, E.T., The Devil and even other YouTubers like idubbbz and Ethan Klein of H3H3 Productions.

Everything about this game's design is extremely well done, from the maps to the characters and the items. It's all custom, it's all Frank-related and you can tell this is a labor of love. The gameplay, however, is slightly disappointing. It works, but racers feel a little slippery, and drifting never seems to work that well. I spent most of the game slipping right off the track and getting demolished by the computer players. Balancing your speed is hard, and one recommendation I can give is to re-map the down-arrow (used to slow down) to another key because you're going to need to control your speed a lot if you want to win, and switching between the up-arrow to accelerate and down to decelerate is not comfy. For around $8 it's hard to recommend this as a great game, but if you're a Filthy Frank fan, it might be worth the buy just to see all the love put into it. The soundtrack also slaps, so there's that

Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water: The Game

This has to be one of the strangest "games" available on Steam. The title says it all, each time someone buys the game, YouTuber and game developer Alain Lagacé of BMC Studios will pound back another glass of water and upload the video to the game every once in a while. What more could you ask for?

This is more of an experiment than a game unless you consider paying a man $2 to drink water gameplay. The download size is hefty at 32 GB, but I guess that's to be expected considering the length and HD quality of the videos.

The presentation is very simple. The game starts with an intro from Lagacé before presenting you with a menu consisting of numbered boxes. Each of these is a video of Lagacé drinking water. In the videos, he has a whiteboard displaying how many glasses he needs to drink, and how many he has already drunk. Between glasses, Lagacé reads through reviews and shouts out buyers of the game. Speaking of which, there's a lot of heated discussions about this game in its community tab, with people seeing it as unsafe and detrimental to have on the Steam store. In fact, the game was previously removed from the Steam store for not being a real game before being reuploaded sometime in May with the addition of a simple game called "Jetpacking Heat," in which you shoot space stuff as a man on a jetpack (shown below, left). But nobody is really here for that, are they?

Lagacé addressed all of this in a video on his YouTube channel, ensuring viewers that he would drink the water incrementally to stay safe. But without that fear of danger, is there any point to all this? Does anyone actually want to see this man safely chug water over Steam? That's not to say he should do it unsafely, but is that not the appeal? It doesn't help that the application is bare-bones to a fault, without the ability to fast forward or explore videos in any way. Overall, this is certainly … something. It's more meme than game, but even more than that it's an experiment in both the developer and the buyer's sanity. At the very least, I can now say I paid $2 to make a man drink water, so that's something to be … proud of? Ashamed of? I really don't know.

What Have We Learned?

If the games above tell us anything, particularly Filthy Frank Kart and The Backrooms, it's that meme games can be full of heart. The developers have gone to painstaking lengths to recreate their favorite pieces of internet culture here and it shows. Even though they're not 100 percent polished, they're worth exploring for any fan of the memes. Even Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water: The Game contains a certain amount of heart and dedication to memeing. If it fails as a game, it more than succeeds as an experiment in memeing, and the small following it's built in the Steam community tab shows at least some people are into it.

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