As a point n click adventure, All You Can Eat is a very simple affair. There are five locations you can visit as a man who has been dining out on an all you can eat voucher for an entire year, all but living in a restaurant. However when an evil corporation decides to force the burger place to close, you take it personally and decide to stop their plans.
Whilst cheaper than a burger, All You Can Eat puts all its hopes in its art style. It’s a hand drawn comic book strip and you move from pane to pane, clicking on things which then brings up a text box pane on your screen. It is extremely novel and works really well for the most part although some may find the off white paper and black lines a bit drab. I found it endearing. The whole idea is that the game follows a 3 panel newspaper comic structure. Conversations with characters follow this approach too, choosing from a couple of prompts and getting a single response and then trying again. Each item can be observed or interacted with and there is a simple inventory too which does allow you to combine things too. You barely use it but that’s because the entire game takes 30 minutes to complete.
At any point in the game, since you move from pane to pane, you can move around all your previous panes and see what you’ve made as the game prints itself into a comic as you play. It’s a great feature made all the better because when you finish the game, you can save your individual playthrough as a PDF and export it. It was the gimmick that drew me into All You Can Eat and it is what makes the game stand out. Whilst there isn’t anything egregious with the point n clicking (the logic makes sense and I didn’t get stuck at any point), its brevity means you aren’t attached to any of the characters. Some classic humour is here, its just over too soon.
All You Can Eat is a case of style over substance, but the price point absolutely reflects that too. For £1.49, you can an unusual point n click adventure that creates a comic for you. That’s not a bad deal – just don’t expect something that will shatter your world. I’d rather have this than a cheeseburger.
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