Welcome to our review of Manual Samuel, a new way to learn where every button on your Nintendo Switch is – and how you can use it in the most ingenious way ever.
Manual Samuel is about the rich daddy’s boy, named Samuel, who hasn’t worked a day in his life. After an unfortunate encounter with a septic tank truck and Death, Sam is forced to live manually for 24 hours to be able to go on with his life. Death resembles Tony Hawk gone wrong for some strange reason. You’ll have to breathe, blink, walk manually and simply exist for Samuel as he experiences the worst day of his life. QWOP meets adventure games in general in this hilarious narrative adventure game for the whole family.
The game is developed by Perfectly ParaNormal, a small game and animation studio based in Hamar (Norway). According to the info I found they have been working since 2011 on small games and animation with a comedic touch. They try to prove that 2D animation is not dead, mixed with a sense of witty humor and likable characters – and boy did they succeed. The game gave me a feeling I was walking through an episode of Rick and Morty judging on the style of humor and animation – for which I applaud the designers of the game. Every character is voiced by a skilled voice actor/voice actress. which is combined with an over-the-top sarcastic narrator.
Gameplay
Like I said in the introduction, the gameplay resembles a mixture between QWOP and the classic adventure games like Monkey Island. Every move you make is coordinated by a button on your Nintendo Switch controller. If you prefer you can also use the motion controls to control parts of Sam’s body, like flicking up his spine in the right position. The game is cut up in chapters, which play out the entire day of Sam’s after-life-experience. You’ll start by getting ready for work, which includes showering, brushing your teeth and dressing up. But since everything goes manually, you’ll also have to breathe and blink while showering or brushing your teeth. If you brush your teeth, you can’t breathe – so spit out the toothpaste before you faint or choke on any leftover toothpaste.
While doing these day-to-day routines, Death will pop in and out, while doing kickflips (or trying to) and giving random advice on how to progress. If you die, you have to start over again, so try to stay alive – is his most used advice, so yeh, very helpful. Once you are fully dressed, you have to drive to work and work a day at the office. I really enjoyed the driving part, since most of Europe drives stick, so we know how hard it is to learn how to drive manually. In America, almost every car is an automatic, so good luck trying to cover the basics on this one. Of course, the game takes a dark turn once you’ll get to work, since Sam’s dad is the boss of a big A.I. robot factory. I won’t spoil anything storywise, but you will laugh your ass off with some of the things you will have to do with Sam and Death.
The bossbattles are fun, but can be a little challenging if you don’t really know how to react to certain actions the boss performs. Luckily, after failing a few times, the sarcastic narrator will help out and tell you how to perform certain actions. This makes the speedrun section of the game a lot more interesting since once you played through the storyline, you are almost ‘pushed’ into speedrunning it (the credits only mention it up to 50 times or so). And why shouldn’t you, the game is fun and Manual Samuel is good for button control. You’ll even earn some achievements and comics (which give some background info on Death and other characters from the game) while doing so.
Conclusion
Manual Samuel does exactly what it promises, it delivers a fun manual action-adventure game with a lovely art design and some great voice acting. It isn’t the longest game in Switch History, but the speedrunning aspect has some potential for the game to be replayed a couple of times. Maybe something for the next instalment for AwesomeGamesDoneQuick? So if you are in the market for some quick fun, please consider picking up Manual Samuel on the eShop!
