Forty-five minutes of uncompressed 1996 Windows 3.1 full-motion video is a war crime under several international treaties, yet New Wave pioneers Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald V. Casale teamed up with software publisher Inscape to inflict exactly that upon the computing public with DEVO Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol. Preserved in all its low-framerate glory via Moric Wilson’s complete twelve-hour playthrough, this interactive CD-ROM fever dream asks a question no modern triple-A studio has the courage to pose: what if Blade Runner were set inside a corporate wasteland where your primary objective is shooting a genetically mutated "Turkey Monkey" with a Spudgun?
Narratively, the experience drops you into the boots of an unnamed operative assisting the rebel Smart Patrol across a strict twelve-hour clock. A freak recombo-DNA lab accident at Lifeforms Unlimited has unleashed the aforementioned Turkey Monkey, a creature actively infecting the population with "Osso Bucco Myelitis"—a condition that translates roughly to Italian veal-shank bone marrow inflammation and reduces human beings into quivering puddles of sentient goo. Between dodging corporate propaganda from media sleazeball Rod Rooter at Big Media and harvesting anti-ooze medication from wheelchair-bound elderly variants of DEVO at the Golden Oasis Retirement Home, you are forced to collaborate with scientists Sun Wang Pin and Dr. Byrthfood while Booji Boy and General Boy (played by Robert Mothersbaugh, Sr.) deliver unhinged philosophical lectures.
Audio-Visual Engineering and Point-and-Click Mechanics
From a gameplay perspective, Inscape’s proprietary 1996 multimedia engine pioneers the "anti-exploration" genre by punishing the player for clicking on anything out of sequence. If you fail your initial encounter with the Turkey Monkey, the game forces you to pop Golden Oasis pills every two hours just to keep your cellular structure from liquefying. Clicking on a Smart Patrol member a second time without reading the manual abruptly deletes an entire hour of your in-game day, shoving you straight to Mr. Ploppy’s Donuts or a weeping Hope Rooter’s bedroom with zero explanation.
In the first ten minutes I almost felt a twinge of nostalgia for the lawless, experimental frontier of 1990s CD-ROM game design, but then I remembered that having my cursor hijacked by tiny, out-of-sync QuickTime windows is psychological torture. The remaining eleven hours of the shift were an exercise in dissociative clicking from that point onward.
Once you survive snooping on a sleeping General Boy’s government computer in Hour 2 and sit through Dr. Byrthfood’s lecture around the thirty-one-minute mark, the third act completely abandons human logic. Hours 9 through 12 play out like a checklist compiled by a sleep-deprived goblin: you bag the Turkey Monkey, endure back-to-back musical performances from Booji Boy and the Smart Patrol, shove an infected Jeremy into a Mutator, lock Sun in a room, acquire a "Kinky Whip" alongside a classified MJ12 document, and promptly evacuate the planet inside a UFO. There is no battle pass, no ray-traced reflection on the Energy Domes, and the censored DEVO music clips runs at the resolution of a postage stamp, yet it somehow contains a little something for everyone who enjoys watching FMV actors chew scenery in front of early-90s green screens.
The GNN Verdict
Simultaneously nominated by GameSpot as a contender for Worst Game of 1996 and hailed by The Atlantic as one of the finest achievements in interactive multimedia history, DEVO Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol is an incomprehensible, hostile, and aggressively weird artifact of de-evolution. The puzzle logic is completely broken and the pacing induces mild Osso Bucco Myelitis of the frontal lobe, but the DOSBox-X emulation didn't crash to desktop once during our review session.
Score: 9.5 / 10 — "It's alright."
You can watch the complete
on YouTube to witness all twelve in-game hours of the 1996 interactive game evaluated in this review.
