First Impressions: Table Manners
Table Manners, courtesy of Echo Chamber Games, is a PC physics-based dating sim in which you play entirely as “a disembodied hand with a knack for catastrophe”. A demo version was available to play at EGX 2019 and it was, quite frankly, delightfully ridiculous.
The controls are deceptively simple - two buttons to raise and lower the hand, movement through the mouse, grab and rotate through the mouse buttons. Five seconds to explain, hours and hours of painstaking practice to master. Hours and hours which, needless to say, I didn’t get at a busy convention.
Having been set up on a date by the helpful hand of the game mechanics, my disembodied hand had to fulfil certain objectives to keep my date happy. Fail enough objectives and the date ends when your partner rage-quits the situation, and there’s a happiness meter to allow you to monitor how your date feels, along with the very obvious and deeply entertaining body language. Interestingly enough, leaving the table on fire had absolutely no effect on anything as my date never actually asked for me to put it out, although the fire was eventually extinguished by a combination of ketchup and champagne (look, it was a lot easier to figure out how to pour things than how to stop pouring things).
The full game is intended to include a wide range of potential dates and customisation options for your hand, allowing for some limited role playing in amongst the extensive damage options. Through the in-game dating app, you can also choose whether to prioritise one relationship exclusively or play the field a little more widely - but play your cards wrong and potential dates will block you before you even make it to the restaurant.
The joy in physics games is in how ludicrously difficult the simplest of tasks become, and Table Manners has that in spades, making this a game which is almost as much fun to watch as it to play. The full game is currently available to wishlist on Steam, with the release planned for the beginning of 2020.
