Have You Played... Wunderdoktor?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Pulling worms out of eye sockets, popping eyeballs back into those sockets, then retrieving the ghosts from inside someone's skull might sound like a grisly business, but Wunderdoktor finds the fun in fungal infections. We're talking actual toadstools growing where toadstools should not grow. Or bits of coral, or little dancing spikes, or whatever the heck else the denizens of Wunderdoktor's strange and macabre world have managed to get lodged in their flesh.

There's more to this delightful game than cute-gross visuals though. It's brill.

You're a travelling doctor, moving from place to place on a rickety train and healing the people who show up in your carriage. To do so, you make incisions with the cursor, while making sure not to touch any tender parts that might cause pain. Your patient's health is already fading and any mistakes you make take away a chunk of their life-force. If it runs out, they die and you need to try again.

There is a story and it's a good one, involving Wunderdoktor's equivalent of Big Pharma trying to muscle in on your independent business with their own less than ethical practices and concoctions. It's more than an excuse to travel the world meeting new people - the fruit and veg folk are a favourite - but it works for that purpose as well.

This is a perfect example of a game that is much more than the sum of its parts and I highly recommend it.