Mayhem in Single Valley has a pretty neat premise: A mysterious figure poisons the water supply of your small town just as you’re heading off the art college. The poison turns animals and people into murderous zombies, thus putting a damper on your travel plans. The set up promises a bunch of relatable yet wacky adventures as you try to save your boring home town that suddenly got a lot less boring. The game sticks pretty close to its “you’re just a normal college student” angle making you weak and mostly weaponless. It also doubles down on the difficulty by making the enemies aggressive, plentiful, and extremely annoying. It’s this design decision that turned off the most, but a handful of other shortcomings made my time with Mayhem in Single Valley decidedly not fun.
You start off with no way to defend yourself except a dodge roll and the rare garbage can lid that breaks when you get hit once; otherwise we’re talking one hit kills here. The early part of the game requires you to take advantage of your dodge roll which doesn’t feel good to execute. It’s difficult to gauge whether the dodge gives you invincibility frames or is just a way to quickly avoid an attack. This combined with difficult to read enemy attacks, enemies that follow you indefinitely, the steady introduction of new enemy types, and the previously mentioned instant death, and the moment-to-moment of Mayhem in Single Valley is a frustrating exercise in trial-and-error. It also doesn’t help that the game’s checkpoint system is inconsistent and unclear when it saves progress. Thankfully you can manually save whenever you want, but you do have to remember to do that.
When you do finally get some offensive tools the game still manages to frustrate. A major feature of the game is using hooch, or moonshine, to transform the evil creatures back into regulars ones. You do this by dousing food objects like acorns, eggs, and carrots with hooch and using a slingshot to launch them at enemies. The trick is to use the right food on the right enemy. For instance, snakes don’t eat carrots, but they do eat eggs, so you’ll want to fling a hooched egg to take care of a pesky snake. At first I found this mechanic clever, however, it became apparent that your supply of hooch is quite limited. You have to fill up empty jars at certain points in the levels then use the clumsy inventory system to apply the hooch to an item. Each jar can only douse one item and you don’t get the empty jars back. It’s just another frustrating level of trial-and-error that you have to learn the hard way.
A few other other questionable design decisions revolve around world navigation and waypointing. The game doesn’t feature a map, which is fine, but it also doesn’t guide you in any direction. This may force you to travel though dangerous areas in search of paths you may have missed. Combine that with the previously mentioned issues around gameplay and you can see how tedious that can get. Some indication around where to go next would have gone a long way, or a map showing how many entrances and exits a room has. The game does bill itself as a Metroidvania, so a map isn’t too much of an ask in my opinion.
It’s a shame I had such a bad time with Mayhem in Single Valley. I really liked the premise and the look at the game. It has some, but not nearly enough, endearing writing around the edges, and the pixel art is quite superb. I also liked the touch of picking up the game’s soundtrack in the form of collectable cassette tapes littered throughout the world. It all just comes down to not enjoying how the game plays and that’s obviously a major issue.
