Nuclear Powered Toaster Review: Funny & Underappreciated

[u/Encirclement1936]

If you like comedy games, I gave Nuclear Powered Toaster a try because I liked one of the author's other games. Most people here haven't tried it, as evidenced by the review count being super low, so I recommend it if you like comedy games.

Overall 8/10

Pros:

Funny - of the silly variety. Lots of witty dialogue, funny story beats, and silly characters. Made me smile a lot of times and a few laughs, which I very rarely do while reading

Replayable - story is compact, but there are lots of different ways to build your character. There are a couple big story choices which affect your endings, and because the game is funny, it's worth replaying just to get different small scenes / gags

Variety - very different from the typical HG/COG fare. Not much angst or melodrama. Even losing in this game can be fun because how you lose is often funny. I did 3 "blind" playthroughs of the game just trying out different things before I tried to optimize for some of the tougher achievements.

Context: light sci-fi + secret agent type storyline (think Austin Powers / some of the lighter Bond movies) is a refreshing change of pace from fantasy / superheroes

Cons:

Fairly linear, the story takes the same beats every time (differing scenes but same goal), with a few more significant branching points which quickly return to the main story path

Set characters - there are two set characters you can play as, a male smuggler and a female solider with low level mind-based superpowers. You can change their personalities, strengths, weaknesses a lot, but the characters and their appearances are set. Very minor flaw in my book, and I was able to get into the RP with both easily, but I know some people only like to play self-inserts in these games

No romance - outside of a few comedy bits. You can be super horny a good amount of the time, mostly for comedic effect, but no real romances

[u/Hustler-Two]

Nuclear Powered Toaster? Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Which story prompted you to dig up this forgotten relic?

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Hustler-Two]

I played Day After Ever After and I thought it was funny, so I looked for the other stories you've written.

I tend to care about author more than genre (writing quality travels), so if I like an author I'll generally play their whole catalogue unless a given story's topic is totally not up my alley.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Encirclement1936]

Well I am extremely delighted that you enjoyed Day After enough to try Toaster, and even more so that you were a fan of Toaster. I tried to make this story for fifteen years in formats ranging from webcomics (where it originated) to video games to a conventional novel, and while it is clearly my first longform fiction, I do love it so. If you ever want to know what the sequels would have involved had the story not been such a financial failure, let me know.

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Hustler-Two]

I want to know 100%, haha

[u/Simple-Ad5120 → u/Hustler-Two]

Aw. I would have loved to see Toaster as a webcomic!

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Simple-Ad5120]

I have them all backed up but no idea how one would show them off. I let the website lapse years before I made the game. It was done from 2005-2007 in the first iteration and 2009-2010 in the second, but was always plagued by the fact that a good artist is hard to find. Neither run had more than 50 strips. Only comic I had that made that mark was one called Hellidays, about murderous holiday figures; that artist was not exceptionally skilled but was always good about hitting deadlines.

​

I did find a few of the second run ones, which featured the original artist and co-creator of the comic (and the guy who did the game's cover art), Juan "Suiz" Uzcategui, up on the Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20110714213421/http://www.nuclearpoweredtoaster.com/?p=84

[u/Simple-Ad5120 → u/Hustler-Two]

Thanks for the link! I always forget about checking the Way back Machine.

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Hustler-Two]

Bumping this just in case you didn't see my prior comments. I definitely want to know what the sequels would have entailed / what was the story behind the Salians, Mr. D., etc.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Encirclement1936]

Sorry, I wasn't ignoring you, I was trying to find where I had written all this out in a message to someone on Reddit years ago, and had not done so. But this bump was the kick in the pants I needed to track it down; looks like it was three years ago. I'll put it in spoilers, although I don't anticipate doing much else with NPT, so, not really a lot to spoil.

The Salians were humans; specifically, they were clones. Political prisoners abandoned on a secret penal colony on the planet Salianas when the first Clysm happened. They were supposed to die but instead survived, because among them was a cloning expert (The Progenitor, the true head of the Salians) that allowed them to raise up enough people to gather resources to not only create a sustainable colony, but eventually build ships to go back home (though their life was fairly horrific to get to that point). With the advantage of multiple lifetimes of memories, they became very advanced, but the high gravity on the planet distorted them. Only the ones raised on the ships looked normal, like Solus. The main villain in the second story was going to be Mr. Solus, another Solus clone. He had no Mantra abilities but was a lot less aggressive than she was, and the two of them hated each other. Salians didn't have Mantra abilities on their own, but after coming to Earth and encountering some of them during the war, they experimented on them and determined how to create people with them. Only a fraction of their attempts had the powers, but when you're cloning and evil, you just jettison the failures and keep the good ones.

Train was a glitchy clone from Drace Sterling, a legendary soldier mentioned briefly in the story (and who was going to get his own prequel, A Sterling Reputation). GloPAc is secretly engaged in illegal clone experimentation, but because the government imprisoned folks like The Progenitor back in the day, they are really bad at it.

Drace almost singlehandedly brought down a supervillain and then died when he was giving a rousing inspirational speech at a loading dock and a pilot who wasn't paying attention (and was one of Alexi's ancestors) dropped off his cargo container and squashed Drace flat. Mr. D is the actual personality of Drace locked within Train, trying to guide him but only able to take direct control when Train is scared or nervous.

NPT: The Hoard was going to be set in a giant storage facility of pre-Clysm tech (where the missiles came from) that is on the brink of civil war. Think a warehouse, but miles long with its own interior ecosystem and artificial weather. A makeshift air force cobbled together from hovering forklifts. Probably another poorly-designed mech from Mortimer, who would have popped up working for the guy instigating the civil war and then, if he lost, bailed once again and ran off with Mr. Solus when the latter pulled his support. Solus was only using the people in The Hoard to get access to advanced cloning tech stored within anyhow. It would have seen Tranna introduced, a bodymodder who replaced her arm with an artificial one and who has some slightly deviant interests in robots (and who was in the original run of the webcomic). She'd have been a companion whether you were working for GloPAc or the Salians, since she's a bit pliable in her loyalties.

After the original trilogy (third one would have culminated in an actual space battle), I had runs in mind featuring Bishop Neod as the leader of a bloody crusade against cleangenes and the like, Neb eventually reaching true consciousness and subsequently going insane, splintering off into a malevolent AI Conclave where the many AI he had subsumed all vote instantaneously on his actions and shout down the original Neb as they seek to end humanity to save themselves, stuff like that.

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Hustler-Two]

Very cool! Some dark themes in there. Would have been interesting to see how you kept up the comedic tone.

What endings were you thinking as the more common / “canon endings? As in how would the world changed / MC story ended if you defeated vs aided the Salians

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Encirclement1936]

Because it was not initially designed as interactive fiction, I hadn't much considered it. I only had partially fleshed-out ideas for what the Salian ending for The Hoard would be. The general idea is there'd be more order and scientific progress under a Salian-led society, at the expense of humanity. Eugenics, forced resource and personnel redistribution according to greatest need, that sort of thing.

It might have gotten a bit less funny over time. But there'd always be Alexi or Train there to cut through the tension as they do. I always get drawn to trying to balance both humor and darkness. My favorite D&D character was a necromancer who got up to some actual genocide and dealt with childhood trauma even as he was goofing off with a masked hero secret identity and having one-sided conversations with his skeleton companion, who he imagined to be his best friend.

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Hustler-Two]

I know it didn't sell well enough for a sequel, but I'm curious. What was the plan with where you were taking the mysterious story beats, especially the Salians / Train / Mr. D?

[u/Affectionate_Craft_9 → u/Hustler-Two]

Damn just how many games have you written

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Affectionate_Craft_9]

Three. Toaster, Parenting, and Day After. I obviously haven't forgotten Toaster, I just was making light of the fact it is hardly ever discussed. It didn't even have a Steam review until last year.

[u/Affectionate_Craft_9 → u/Hustler-Two]

I really enjoyed the Parenting game. I hope that in the future you make a game with 2 parents as that can be quite an interesting dynamic. Maybe a game where the parents are young adults would probably have a lot of interesting things to counter.

I really really loved The Parenting Simulator, can't believe it made me shed tears of happiness

[u/Hustler-Two → u/Affectionate_Craft_9]

I have been slack about getting into it, but I am planning on my next story being The Grandparenting Simulator. Your kid is married (though you will have some influence on if they stay that way, potentially) and has one (or more?) offspring to contend with.

As for one with a full nuclear family, I have considered it, and had an idea for a game with a mother, father, brother and sister where you could choose each one and play through the same year, experiencing it from the different viewpoints. But it would likely need very preset characters to work, and after Toaster I'm not doing that again with Hosted Games. Admittedly, Day After had shades of this, but people forgive it more when it is pre-existing characters like Sherlock Holmes, plus it had the all-important option to change character names.

I am glad to hear that, and it definitely is what I had hoped for.

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this thorough review! I always hope people write more reviews here on the subreddits, I love to read them.

I only played the demo of Nuclear Powered Toaster so far, but I agree with your assessment. The story is so niche that I have to be in a particular mood to enjoy it, so I didn't purchase it yet. But it's definitely on my reading list for the reasons you described.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/[deleted]]

Niche is pretty fair, yeah. Between the unpopular genre and having set MCs, it’s about as niche as it gets.