ENA Dream Barbeque so far is an unhinged but delightful weirdcore adventure game that eschews the obnoxious trappings and fetishistic spiel so commonly espoused by the genre. The game freely mixes puzzle solving and platforming in an unconventional but welcome manner, cueing such conventions so well as to never make the player feel confused. The game employs a international cast of voice actors to speak the zany cast's dialogue in an assortment of real life languages, garnering the game a unique and sometimes mystifying appeal. Dialogue with such characters often results in unexpected cuts to short absurd vignettes that keeps the game fresh--never falling victim to routine.

In much the same manner as the web series, the plot is grammatically scrambled, creating a kind of double entendre in which meaning is often legible while intention points somewhere more abstract and subtextual. Existential grief and blunt emotional outbursts accompanied by abrupt, striking visual gags periodically rupture the dialogue, as though the characters themselves are growing increasingly frustrated with having to communicate through codified language. “Can I interest you in a divestment opportunity?” opens a conversation with the neurotic Pasky Maiden-- a character represented by a 2D sprite-- whose apparent idleness and jealousy of the protagonist's exercising of duty prompts her to lash out in a distorted voice accompanied by her transorming into a 3D triangulated approximation of her face.


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