We shan’t spoil the best part of this text-based Paul McCartney game, but know this: It rules
There are plenty of little tiny moments of delight in The Paul McCartney Simulator, an itch.io text-based adventure game from Brooklyn comedian Ramsey Ess. But the best is one that’s such a fun, weird, perfect, and oddly relatable surprise that we’re loathe to spoil it. Perhaps you should go play it and then we can get down to business. But first, some details:
The premise of The Paul McCartney simulator is straightforward enough. You are Paul McCartney, sometimes known as Macca, a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who was for some 11 years the frontperson for a band called Wings, and before that was one of four strikingly coiffed young men in an outfit called The Beatles (not a typo). You can choose to enter your life in one of three years: in 1968, as you and your fellow Beatles are attempting to record the eventual theme song to the 1989-1193 ABC television show Life Goes On; 1973, which finds you onstage with the rest of the Wings band, including your wife Linda; or 2018, in which you’re somehow doing Carpool Karaoke. You make decisions, have things added to or removed from your inventory, and occasionally jump around in time.