"FANTASTIC GAME OR THE FANTASTIC GAME OR FANTASTIC OR GAME WITH EGG IS MY GAME THE GAME FANTASTIC, BY ME, FANTASTICANEER. I MAKE THE GAME FANTASTIC FOR THE FRIENDLY CONSUMER, MISTER INDIE!! GAME PLAYS PEOPLE OF ALL KINDS, SO PLAY GAME. FANTASTIC GAME!!"
— The Fantasticaneer
The Fantastic Game is a fantastic game in which you explore a strange, exotic land, filled with many traps and treasures, monoliths and monsters, eggs and edifices.
You play in a first person perspective, wandering through the world in search of the elusive 'Dollaz', the world's currency, and the means to access new locations. They can be hidden in a variety of locations, though some are just sitting in plain sight.
The Fantastic Game can be found here
, at Fantasticaneer's Tumblr.
This game provides examples of:
- Bizarre Puzzle Game: Find Dollaz in a strangely constructed landscape in the sky, with no ultimate goal. That's it.
- Bottomless Pit: The area under most of the platforms is one, although it's non-lethal, and you'll just fall forever if you don't respawn manually. Certain areas will teleport you back to another platform if you fall, and to get a Dolla, you need to jump off the ledge behind the game's starting point, and fall down to a platform with pictures of pictures of a rooster, spotted dick, Dick Biondi, and Richard Nixon all around a Dolla.
- Broken Record: The aptly named 'Smash Mouth Eggs' repeat the line "So much to do, so much to see!" from the song 'All Star'. Constantly.
- The Cameo: A picture of Jeff Goldblum can be found in the purple maze, with a small sign next to it that says 'J. GOLDBLUM'.
- Door to Before: After passing through the frog head door and the art museum, a door will pop up that lets you move from there to the grassy area at the start of the game without having to walk all the way back.
- Endless Corridor: Quite a few of them.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: There are some objects with "CUBE" plastered all over them. Guess what they are!
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: You'll come across a couple chairs with eyes. Non-functioning eyes, but they're eerie nonetheless.
- Faceless Eye: A huge, floating eye can be found in an abyss, 'guarding' a Dolla. It doesn't pose any threat directly, but it can be startling.
- Ghost Town: There isn't any other living being in the entire game.
- Intentional Engrish for Funny: Some of the messages found in the game are presented like this, as well as most of the things Fantasticaneer says.
- Interface Screw: Jumping down a certain pit (see Non-Standard Game Over below) will crank the field of view so high you won't be able to tell where you're going.
- In the Style of: The floating platform in version 1.0 has a portion of Pendulum's 'Propane Nightmares' playing there, while version 1.fun has a MIDI version of the song due to copyright reasons. Ostensibly, it's a cover done on an instrument called the "plungophone".
- Leap of Faith: Two, one to get from the corner of the main platform to one far away, and another is a Shout-Out to the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, complete with sound clips.
- The Maze: Made all the more difficult by the fact that the texture on the walls can be disorienting.
- Non-Standard Game Over: There's a pit near the starting area that tells you not to jump down it. Jumping down it sends you to a black room with the "GAME OVER" screen from Marcos Lopez: Part II plastered on every wall, and turns the field of view up incredibly high while playing a loop from the Evolution Control Committee's "I Want A Cookie." Neither of these things stops, even if you respawn.
- No Plot? No Problem!: Who needs a story when everything is so fantastic?
- Scavenger Hunt: The point of the game is to find Dollaz and open doors. To open doors, you need Dollaz, and behind doors are usually more Dollaz.
- Shaped Like Itself: In both parts of the world, you'll find a set of cubes, with the word 'CUBE' repeated against a colored background as the texture on all six sides.
- Shout-Out: The references are numerous, and surprisingly varied, such as:
- Jumping into the painting for Bob-Omb Battlefield to reach another area, complete with the proper sounds.
- A Polybius arcade cabinet.
- The aformentioned 'leap of faith' from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
- One wall has the logo for The Incredible Crisis on it, and falling from the ledge next to it will play Taneo's scream from that game.
- A wall in the purple maze has a picture from one of Vinny's streams.
- The 'No Yoshi' sign
Dummied Out in Super Mario World's code. - The sound used when collecting a Dolla comes from one of motdef's Moonbase Alpha videos.
- Pictures in the art gallery, including:
- The Happytown train from LSD: Dream Emulator.
- The mysterious cave from LEGO Island.
- The 'Who are you running from?' error picture from the Game Boy Camera.
- The art gallery itself borrows a music track from Osada.
- A giant group of eggs can be found in one of the corners of the map, blaring an excerpt from "All Star" by Smash Mouth. In addition to the song snippet, the eggs themselves reference a charity event from 2011 where the lead singer of Smash Mouth ate 24 eggs in one sitting after persistent heckling to do so by users on Twitter and Something Awful.
- Theme Tune: Jonathan Coulton's "I Feel Fantastic" is somewhat of an unofficial theme for the game, and can be heard playing in and around the Fantastic Orb's chamber
