Dishwasher is #1 on Major Nelson’s list for the second week in a row!  Awesome thanks to everyone who gave it a shot.  It’s been a long, crazy road, fraught with peril and chainsaws, but I think it worked!

Anyway, Dishwasher has been in the hands of merciless reviewers for almost a fortnight.

I’ve noticed a trend: everyone thinks that The Dishwasher is either an awesome game or a button masher.

This leads me to conclude that if you don’t play The Dishwasher like a button masher, you’ll think it’s an awesome game.  If you do play The Dishwasher like a button masher, well, eh… here’s what happens:

  • You’ll get bored
  • You’ll die
  • You’ll get bored of dying
  • You’ll write a review about how the game is boring and you die… and, seeing as it involves hand-drawn quirky art, must be compared to Alien Hominid

The Dishwasher is full of tricky, clever strategies that you must use if you want to make it on the higher difficulties.  Play the game like a button masher and you won’t really see what all the fuss is about.  Seems like the world of games journalism is divided into the “gamer” crowd and the “cooking mama” crowd.

So, here’s official word from the developer: Dishwasher is not a button masher!

Thank you. 🙂

I got a bunch of emails from indie gaming sites telling me they reviewed Dishwasher and loved it.  Here they are, after the jump:

Diehard GameFAN praised the “white knuckle difficulty combined with the non-stop action.”  They also won my undying love with this gem:

The challenge will put some people off of the game since if you try to button mash through it or do not get the hang of managing enemies and using combos, there is no way to progress.

Duh! 😀

Dutch Gaming Society epically declared “Het is gelijktijdig een liefdesverklaring naar de brawlers van vroeger en een bewijs van vooruitgang binnen het genre. It is simultaneously a love declaration to the brawlers of the past and proof of progress within the genre.”  Google translate FTW!

FreezeCracker said “Overall, this game is for the gamers who label themselves hardcore and drink milk out of the carton. If you have the drive to learn and perfect the ways of the samurai in a video game, then hell yeah I will recommend you buy this the hell right now. The amount of replay value is insane, and I can promise you will be able to see yourself playing this game months from now, even years.”

And finally, a bunch of [CONTENT WARNING] Canadians did a video review:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FQfvKz6P0c]

Update: My Belgian friend Loïc was quick to point out that I’ve done it: I’ve pulled the “reviewers don’t understand me” trick!  I’ve gone emo!  Sorry about the whine!  I’m not sure if we had a bet going on this one, but I may end up having to ship more Hello Kitty merchandice to Belgium if we did :(.