Sorry Ass

When some new text adventure showed up on BBS in the mid-nineties, the first thing you'd try was hitting up the local bar. Sorry Ass follows the same playbook, except with way more vulgarity and zero pretense about playing it straight.

It's interactive fiction where you roam around the city, meet various characters, and mostly just try not to get yourself into trouble. Or maybe you do want to get into trouble and take it hard on the chin. The game doesn't measure success by solving anything triumphantly—it measures you by how long you can actually survive in this unhinged world. Sometimes you get beat down. Sometimes someone tries to rob you blind. Sometimes you just end up in such a pathetic state you know you've hit rock bottom.

The controls are classic for the era—typing commands, navigating rooms, picking dialogue options from what's offered. The game doesn't point you anywhere, so plenty of times you're scratching your head wondering what to do next. Hell, you don't have to do anything at all—just wander the world like a vagrant. That's not a design flaw, that's intentional. It assumes you're playing consciously, that you know your place in the city's street hierarchy, and that standing in a corner and staring is perfectly legit sometimes.

Sorry Ass has some real historical value in it. It's one of those games that tried to drop you somewhere mainstream games won't touch. This one takes it further than most—it's not after heroics or moral lessons. It just says: here's the world, now figure yourself out in it. Time's been rough on it, honestly—it kind of got forgotten and now you only find it lurking in certain corners of the internet.

Today you'd play it mostly out of curiosity, to see what it was all about. It's not funny in the conventional sense—the humor is dark and raw like a bar at three in the morning. You don't have to win it to remember it; you just need to feel out what the creators were reaching for and whether it clicks with you. If you're into eighties and nineties adventures, even the ones that went nowhere, this is worth a playthrough at least once.