Video Game Review: 'Liar's Bar'

WARNING: READ BEFORE PLAYING

Liar's Bar contains intense and graphic depictions of violence and death, themes of suicide, and other mature content that may not be suitable for all audiences. Player discretion is adviced. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm or suicide, please seek help from a qualified professional or contact a local mental health service. Your well-being is important to us, and we encourage players to prioritize their mental health while engaging with our game.

The game features mature themes, and is intended for adult audiences only. If you are under 16, please step outside.

This warning is one of the first things you see after booting up Liar's Bar. I want to stress, and I don't care what you think of "trigger warnings", this warning is not kidding. This is a messed up, repugnant game; I think I kind of love it. (It also contains depictions of tobacco use.)

Okay, real talk, this is kind of a dark streak of submissions from this contributor (thank goodness for animated movies ... with jokes about infant mortality!), this game might be the most worrisome yet. I retweeted some fan art of the game, then realized, out of context, that might not look like something entirely, well, healthy to be reposting. Because the marquis attraction of Liar's Bar is that it's basically a furry Russian roulette simulator. Just so you know what you're getting into.

Liar's Bar is published by Curve Animation, and is currently available on Steam for $6.99, where it is still an "Early Access" game.

The dark "game"

There's a joke on Twitter about about the "Torment Nexus", in which scientists are inspired to create it after reading the science fiction novel Do Not Create the Torment Nexus. But, one of the marvels of the human mind is how often fictional horror scenarios genuinely inspire people to say, "wow, other than the horrific deaths, that actually sounds fun" and then find a way create a sort of "Torment Nexus ... But Fun!" The classic short horror story "The Most Dangerous Game" inspired paintball, while the Japanese horror film Battle Royale correctly predicted school children would be fighting each other to the death until only one remained, but the only thing it got wrong was that they'd do it in Fortnite, a game so relatively innocuous I didn't even think to mention it in my rundown of recent "dark" articles in my introduction. So, it seems inevitable that even Russian roulette would eventually get turned into something fun.

Russian roulette is pretty dark, usually the subject matter of lurid pulp fiction, greasy yellow tabloid journalism, and, uh, era defining Best Pictures. It definitely occurs in real life, but is not a commonly played game, by any means. As something to turn into a video game, it has the advantage of actually already being a game, but it also has one major disadvantage. It is entirely luck based. In real life, the "skill" involved is having the nerve, desperation, or just lack of caring to pull the trigger. In a video game, you aren't actually risking anything, so your avatar randomly dying or not dying doesn't mean much. In the bad old days of early Internet, when Newgrounds's motto was "The Problems of Tomorrow, Today!", Flash Russian roulette simulators were actually common, but they mostly just played the game as a sick joke.

Liar's Bar spin on the "game" of spinning

Liar's Bar solves this problem by making Russian roulette not the only game you play. Players compete in a card game, Liar's Deck, which features a deck of twenty cards. Six queens, six kings and six aces, plus two jokers. Each player is dealt five cards, and they must play one to three cards each turn until they run out, when they're safe (unless there are only two players left, which means they are auto-called by the game). However, each hand, they are only "allowed" to play one of the three face cards or jokers. As it is unlikely (though not impossible) that any player has been dealt five of the correct cards, players will be forced to bluff about what cards they are laying face down. The next player can call a bluff. If the player did lie, they pull the trigger on their revolver. If the player was telling the truth, the caller must pull the trigger. Each time the trigger is pulled, the odds increase that this time, the bullet is in the chamber, until it becomes certain on the sixth.

There is also Liar's Dice, but I'm not as big a fan of it, and it technically isn't Russian roulette. The punishment for a bad call is drinking a bottle of arsenic. There is no randomness here. Two bottles, and you're out. That's not so bad, and I think they should split the execution methods from the game modes, and allow them to be selectable. Russian roulette if you've got time, poison if you want a quick game. But the game involves everyone rolling five six-sided dice, then making guesses as to how many of a certain roll the entire table made (so, for example, four sixes). Each player in turn must make a similar guess, but the first number cannot go down (so, continuing the example, you cannot guess three sixes, but if you want to guess four threes, that's allowed). This to me kind of seems like it goes against the whole Liar's Bar thing, as a call out of "Liar!" is less an accusation of dishonesty, and more an accusation of just being a bad guesser. However, full disclosure, I have never actually been able to play a game of Liar's Dice, as it freezes up my laptop every time, no matter how low I put the graphical settings on. I've watched videos on YouTube, and people seem to have fun.

The game's art style is appropriate for what is taking place. The titular Liar's Bar is apparently a grimy place, with graffiti on the wall, and an out of order bathroom. NPCs in the background include a pipe-smoking bear, who seems to be the only person in the bar outside the players that actually seems to take an interest in the game, the bar's in house entertainment, a chimpanzee with a guitar, the horse bartender who most everyone seems to think looks like Bojack Horseman, and a chicken drunk I seem to be the only one who thinks is a dead ringer for the dad from Disney's Chicken Little (I'd be driven to drink if I was in that movie, too). The whole place is viewed from a first person perspective, which, on top of making the Russian roulette sequences that much more nerve-wracking, also allows you to look around. The game is not VR, but it feels like it could be, and maybe was supposed to be, at one point.

The Furry Characters

The game released with four characters you could play as, with Toar the bull, Bristle the pig, Scubby the dog and Foxy the ... girl one. A recent update has added two new characters, doubling your female options with Cupcake the rabbit, as well as Gerk the rhino. The game also recently added a smidge of backstory for the characters, though the "Table Stories" are just one page comics that don't actually tell you much you couldn't have guessed already (wow, the people playing Russian roulette and drinking poison are either desperate, depressed, psychotic or have a gambling addiction, didn't see any of those coming). I like the character designs alright, though I have to admit that Foxy does look like she could be the illegitimate love child of Zootopia's Nick Wilde and The Bad Guy's Diane Foxington. However, her Goth chick look makes up for this (and she does seem to have inherited her theoretical mother's love of piercings, though I think her eyebrow is about the only thing she doesn't have pierced).

The characters, not even Foxy, do not have tails (if they have tells, that's up to you to find), but I'll allow it for once, as they are seated and basically only viewable from the waist up most of the time. Still, might have been nice on the character select screen, at least. The characters move their heads around on your opponent's screen as you look around the bar, and if you use a mic, their mouths do open and close when you talk. It's mostly just lip flapping, but it's still appreciated. I have seen videos of gameplay where dead characters continue to "talk" if the now spectating player uses their mic, which is kind of disturbing, but they seem to have fixed that.

And speaking of dead characters, well, the game is Russian roulette. The death animations are bloody but quick. There is not a lot of gore outside of the blood, though, and the blood is actually probably nowhere near the actual amount that would be spilt in real life. Not that I'm an expert, mind you. Brains aren't going to splatter the wall, and the deaths are nowhere near the level of brutality of Mortal Kombat fatalities. The deaths by poison are a bit more drawn out, and possibly a bit more gruesome, especially since characters enter a "poisoned" state after drinking their first bottle. Either way, the characters tend to die with their eyes wide open, so they tend to stare at you the rest of the game.

The use of animal characters is an interesting one, as these characters are not super cute. I mean, Foxy and Cupcake are, but even they still look like they belong in an adult game. To go back to old, bad Internet times and their gruesome Flash animations, this isn't like Happy Tree Friends, with a cute style being part of the darkly humorous gag. These characters are not supposed to look like children's game characters. Yes, I've heard the game described as "the seedy underbelly of Zootopia we don't see in the movie", but in general, most people are just accepting that these cartoon animals deserve to be here in this bar, doing what they are doing. Heck, Scubby and the background bear both smoke, and in America, after Joe Camel, that's actually a bigger taboo than fairly graphic depictions of Russian roulette. I joked about "depictions of tobacco use" above, but it really is a pretty big deal. This is unashamedly adult funny animals.

Of course, that brings us to the question of why are the characters funny animals? Well, honestly, the reason seems to be that it does take a bit of the sting off the deaths. If the avatars were human, I don't think it would fly as well, at least not at this level of semi-realistic detail. The animal characters give it just a tinge of fantasy, making it just okay enough.

Conclusion

All in all, I found the experience of playing the game to be absolutely nerve-wracking, but in a fun way. It features very dark subject matter, and I can honestly say the whole thing is actually in very bad taste. But bad taste is still taste, and I'd defend its final execution of that taste, as it were. As the opening of Universal's 1931 Frankenstein put it in the granddaddy of all trigger warnings, "I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to ... well, we warned you."