Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's: IFcomp 2022

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's is a choice-based comedy by Geoffrey Golden that was entered into IFcomp 2022. 

This entry quickly establishes the stakes involved: the success of your next Zoom meeting with corporate depends on your ability to push Schtupmeister beer on a restaurant full of unsuspecting marks. It delivers an entertainingly goofy night on the job.

There are five different narrative threads that you can focus on, using either your psychic powers or more mundane observational skills. The key is to intervene at precisely the right moment, and spending too long with any one story risks missing a key moment elsewhere. 

I really enjoyed the tone of this entry, which fully embraced the absurdist corporate marketing deployed by retail food and beverage companies, describing edible horrors like Sriracha whipped cream that sounded just plausible enough to exist. 

It’s all delivered with a cheerfully sociopathic indifference: 

But it’s also worth noting that this entry, which asks you to engage in guerilla marketing to promote Schtupmeister beer, feels like its own work of guerilla marketing to promote the Adventure Snack Newsletter. 

And that’s fine! I honestly enjoyed reading through this story several times to explore each narrative thread and the ways that they could be pushed to interact with each other. 

Lord knows that there have been stunt entries in previous years that weren’t nearly as entertaining.