Dude, Stop
is a Puzzle Game developed and produced by Team HalfBeard. It received a Steam release on June 1, 2018.
The game asks the player (literally, in the form of fully voiced narration) to perform a series of small puzzles, such as placing a stamp in the correct spot on an envelope, or wearing sandals without socks. However, the true goal is to intentionally mess up as much as possible.
Place the Tropes above this...no, not below, darn you!
- Actually Pretty Funny: If you can somehow balance a Christmas Tree upside down on its tip in the last pick, you get an achievement, the creator accepts it as a correct answer, and actually permits himself a laugh at the silliness.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The narrator's D.U.C.K. program ends up gaining self-awareness and a desire to show others how to solve puzzles as badly as the player.
- The Bet: There's one between the narrator and his friend on whether or not the player will succeed at the puzzles.
- Big Bad Ensemble: The narrator constantly antagonizes the player for not following his idea of order, and decides to activate the D.U.C.K. program to counter you, only for the program to end up breaking the game and its rules, hindering both the player and the narrator.
- Bilingual Bonus: Played with. After failing the sixth pack, the narrator may pull this snark:Narrator: Yeah, you learned nothing. Sprechen Sie English, por favor?
- Bland-Name Product: In one puzzle, you have to make a sandwich with the creator's "Favorite Chocolate Cream." Low-res pixel graphics or no, the jar that's used is pretty blatantly a jar of Nutella.◊
- Break the Haughty: AND HOW. The entire game is a constant dragging-session towards the creator.
- Blamed for Being Railroaded: While the player can choose to follow instructions some of the time, the very first series of puzzles are impossible to succeed at all due to the narrator being too busy with a phone call to explain them. The player is then blamed for ruining everything and kicked out of the game, until the narrator realizes he may have been acting a tad too harshly. Unlike most games with this trope, however, the overall narrative isn't on the side of the narrator.
- This continues throughout the game. There's several points where a "good guy" run is impossible, and you HAVE to go back and fail puzzles you previously won on before the game lets you progress.
- Book Ends: The creator completely loses his patience with you and smashes you to a game-over screen twice in the game. Once at the beginning when you fail the 4 unwinnable challenges, and again at the end when The D.U.C.K. uploads its database and pings all of his friends via email about it.
- British Stuffiness: The narrator, though it tends to come across as "whiny-ness" more often than not.
- Collection Sidequest: There are a series of puzzle pieces scattered throughout the various puzzle packs that are needed to unlock a trophy.
- Companion Cube: The photos in the second album on the narrator's phone heavily implies he's obsessed with cups, to the point where he dated, married, and started a family with one of them.
- Curse Cut Short: Both at the start and the end of the game when the creator completely loses his rag with you."YOU NASTY PIECE OF-" *Sudden Silence* Thank you for playing!
- Developer's Foresight: If you drill into the light switch in the drull puzzle, not only will your drilling cause sparks to fly as you do so but the light will start to flicker as well.
- Failure Is the Only Option: At the end of pack 7, the player is tasked with destroying the D.U.C.K. The final step to doing so involves 2 buttons, 1 labeled "Blue", and 1 labeled "Red", and the player is instructed to click the "Blue" button. However, the "Blue" button is colored red and the "Red" button is colored blue. In the end, it doesn't matter which button you click, as both of them are considered the "Red" button, and as a result the D.U.C.K. doesn't get destroyed.
- Fun with Acronyms: After a certain point, the narrator attempts to use a program called D.U.C.K., with a rubber ducky for a logo, to prevent the player from ruining the puzzles.
- Greater-Scope Villain: When the D.U.C.K. connects to the developer's computer and shares his conversation with his friend, someone named Marc is revealed to be the one behind The Bet, said bet being the cause of the developer's antagonism towards the player.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The narrator implemented the D.U.C.K. to curtail the player's bad solutions, but because it's so buggy it winds up learning from the player's bad behavior and starts preventing good solutions instead, becoming an even bigger menace to the narrator.
- Ironic Echo: At both the beginning and the very end of the game, up to when the player gets the final trophy, the developer expresses rage towards the player's disobedience with the same phrase of "YOU NASTY PIECE OF SH--".
- Jerkass: The developer is an extreme control freak who won't allow you to do anything fun if he has his way.
- Minigame Game: Each "pack" contains various minigame-like situations that the player can choose to screw up or not.
- Noodle Incident: It's not specified exactly what the bet is, or what the stakes are. However, given that the creator opts to skip the country rather than endure his side of the bet, one can only guess how bad it is.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: The first sign that using the D.U.C.K. might have been a bad idea is when the screen starts to glitch heavily during it's loading sequence. Similar distortions also appear on the screen whenever the duck modifies something within the game's code or shifts control away from the narrator.
- Pastiche: The "player vs. narrator" style feels reminiscent of The Stanley Parable, but with a less endearing antagonist.
- Poke the Poodle: To fail a puzzle, the player has to do things like choosing Comic Sans as a font, stepping on cracks, or letting a phone charge up to 99.9%.
- Rage Against the Author: Defying the in-game developer persona is the main point.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The narrator gives these out whenever the player intentionally fails the majority of a puzzle pack.
- Sanity Slippage: You can distinctly notice the developer getting more frustrated and frantic as time goes on until he eventually ends the game in a scream of psychotic rage.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the results of winning the walking game is a Monty Python gag.
"You reminded me of that Ministry of Silly Walks!...But I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about.- When opening the Exam pack for the first time, the narrator does a mockup of "The 3 little pigs". One of the pigs is green, and he steals a bunch of bird eggs and regrets it.
- One opening to the crayon puzzle quotes Man of Steel.
"What's the S stand for? It's not an S, in our game that means 'five'."- The narrator also riffs on The Dark Knight's infamous pencil scene in the Tetris level for a two-fer reference.
- One of the debug options during the D.U.C.K. sequence is the menu theme, which can be blue-and-black, or white-and-gold, much like
a certain dress. - One of the cups is literally called RoboCup. Definitely not related to the movie.
- Pack eleven features a puzzle about kicking rubbish into a bin. The good solution splash text sometimes reads "Mom's Spaghetti."
- Speaking of pack eleven, the good cup is described as a holy grail and retireved from a stone puzzle, with the subtitle "It Belongs in a Museum" to cap it off.
- When D.U.C.K. asks for a port to connect to the internet, you have some interesting options to pick from, including:
- At one point the narrator describes you as a dog in a manger.
- The pack eleven bad cup features both a buttscratcher complete with intonation ripped from the relevant cutaway, and the Eye of the Tiger.
- Spiteful Spoiler: The trophy for being incorrect on the fifth pack is "Dumbledore dies." Something of which everyone knows of if they're even partially invested in modern pop culture, which is the joke.
- Title Drop: In the third D.U.C.K. screenshare of pack ten, one of the narrator's instant messages to his friend not only repeats the title but also the punctuation it's phrased with.
- Towers of Hanoi: One of the puzzles is a five-disc version. You get an achievement for solving it with the minimum number of moves, and another for "cheating" it, as you can manipulate the discs using game physics in contravention to the rules of the Stock Puzzle
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The game allows you not to do things perfectly. As the player, you are constantly given free rein to do this, and are occasionally rewarded for it.
- Video Game Perversity Potential: It's possible to make a blocky penis in the building block puzzle. The game reacts in disgust if you do.
- Villainous Breakdown: Near the end of the game, D.U.C.K. is about to send your bad solutions to Mark and ruin the narrator's dignity, who at this point openly admits he's run out of threats and starts hyperventilating.
- Villain Respect: Very occasionally, your wrongdoing can get some legitimate respect from the creator. A notable example is when cutting a pizza, cutting it in a way that produces 11 pieces with 4 straight cuts."Whoa, 11 Pieces! I'm not even mad, that's amazing!" Failure text: MAXIMUM EFFORT
- Worthy Opponent: The creator, later on in the game, seems to enjoy seeing how the player is capable of creatively failing between his anger at failure toward simple tasks. He also treats the player slightly more amicably if you play the game after beating it, after his plan to leave the country failed.
- Written Sound Effect: The game accommodates for people playing it with the sound off by illustrating some sound effects. Or in one case, the lack thereof.*Sudden Silence*
- You Are Number 6: The player is usually identified by the narrator as Tester #17.note
