Conga Master Party! is a dumb game.
It’s a strange concept, with aliens and pigs, bartenders and nerds, bathrooms and discos. It even somehow rips off Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto and Cut the Rope. It’s silly, it’s short and it’s shallow.
Conga Master Party! is a dumb game, but it’s also possibly abso-fucking-lutely brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzG1wZ5fgWg
There’s no hiding the inspiration behind Conga Master Party!: the classic, decades-old Snake game, where we move around a field and grow our tail, is essentially the core experience. In this case the tail is made of people and the play field is a dance floor, and there also pigs. There’s an enjoyable soundtrack, some gameplay powerups, the occasional obstacle and bizarrely cute characters, but developers Undercoders aren’t shying away from what the intent is, and that’s completely fine.
These superficial layers added on top of the core idea spur an almost all-to-obvious question — why didn’t anyone ever link Snake to a conga line before? It works so well that it’s possibly hard to separate the two now.
For one, the gameplay is incredibly simple, as our favorite conga lines are, in that we just have to dance around someone long enough for them to hop in line. If we bump into them that fever (presented by a growing heart meter) subsides and we need to start gyrating from the beginning again. The longer the line, the closer to whatever that stage’s completion goal is, usually fulfilled by collecting a specific amount of various types of dancers. The levels are quick, completable in a short few minutes, and designed to be picked up and put down as needed.
That’s ideal, because there really isn’t much to the game anyways.
There are a few single player modes and cute selectable characters, each with mostly meaningless abilities, but the magic is really in the multiplayer. While it controls mostly the same, the themed modifiers ask us to do things like cut apart our opponents’ lines, or send obstacles their way, or do a serious of poses that need to be copied, a la Just Dance. The game is great with a 7 yr old kid, but obnoxiously fun and chaotic with a group of inebriated adults.
Or alone on a couch at 9 PM during a lopsided blowout of your favorite college football team, if you prefer that way, racking up scores in endless mode or via the club-hopping narrative that the dev team has managed to squeeze into the software. It was a rough Saturday.
Thankfully, the often mindless nature of Conga Master Party! can absorb our time when we’re by ourselves or gives us a rowdy night with friends. Give credit to the game’s simplicity, where “it’s so easy a baby can do it” actually has some meaning. The game is dumb, it’s silly, but I have a feeling I’ll be hopping back in line when I need that easy digital comfort food.
Conga Master Party! is available for Switch and PC. This review is based on an eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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