For those of you who don’t remember, back in the early 2000s, Burger King’s marketing department discovered the line between “cleverly funny” and “call-the-cops disturbing” and decided to straddle that line like a 600-pound man balancing on a bicycle seat. They released a series of commercials in which a chibi-headed king approached people in awkward scenarios or appeared in unusual hiding places, only to pull a Burger King menu item out of his robes, after which a voice-over would tell you about said item if not just to distract you from wondering about the amount of Rohypnol the King may have just slipped an innocent bystander. Shortly after this, however, the marketing department decided to double down on this method of selling hamburgers by associating them with a masked stalker, and released the game Sneak King (ah, sneaking! I see what you did there!) for the XBox and XBox 360.

Uhh…I don’t know whether I should include a trigger warning in this caption or call the police on my game. Even the commercial campaign looks at this and says, “Dude…a little too far.”

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe this one. It feels like a casual game, except it obviously plays on a console (since mobile phones in 2006 had all the processing power of a ham sandwich). I could almost compare it to a licensed game, as it aims to re-enact the commercials, but I find something almost unclean about the thought of Burger King not only charging me for their advertisements, but also labeling it “some assembly required.” At its core, Sneak King relies on stealth, a bold move considering most games include stealth elements more to give the appearance of variety than as an option they actually expect people to use, much like McDonald’s including a salad on their menu to let them shout out to gainsayers, “look! We have healthy options!” Although considering Burger King’s extensive history of game development and the game’s mechanics themselves, I can only assume they made this decision out of sheer coincidence.

In Sneak King, you take on the role of the King, ostensibly sneaking up on people to deliver food, although the NPCs have almost as much visual prowess as a one-eyed hedgehog with its head stuck in a traffic cone, so as long as you don’t barge through a busy intersection, the game pretty much boils down to how fast you can locate hungry people and get to them before they double over in pain and pass out cold, an activity I generally engage in only after eating Burger King food. This does pose a reasonable challenge, however, as these characters only blip on your radar immediately after their first hunger pangs, and afterward must be located entirely by looking for the people with thought bubbles over their heads dangling burgers just out of reach. From beginning to end, the entire process can take less than thirty seconds, so unless the King includes a shot of insulin with their meal, I doubt that any food hiding in his royal tights can save these people from slipping into a diabetic coma.

They actually can see him…they just pretend they can’t. If you avoid eye contact, you don’t have to talk to him.

The challenge of racking up higher and higher scores provides the primary appeal of the game. Certain factors can multiply your score, such as how often people have spotted you, how close you get to the target before giving them food, and how much flourish you use to bestow the royal meat unto your subjects. However, you can increase your score fivefold by crawling into a barrel, dumpster, toilet stall, or any other hiding place before your hungry victim strolls by. This, sadly, doesn’t work very well. Despite having plenty of hiding places in each level, the NPCs all move on a programmed circuit, and most of them don’t get close enough to the hiding places for this to work. Furthermore, the ones that do either don’t get hungry at the right times, or they’ll spot the King slowly easing himself into his hidey-hole like an old man into a hot bath, a swimmer into Lake Superior in June, or a Carolinian politician into the thought of taking down the Confederate flag. Each of the four levels has twenty different missions, and those that require you deliver from hiding places usually end up with me finding one well-trafficked dumpster, then squatting in it for upwards of fifteen minutes while I wait for enough people to come by to get their hot, delicious burger and its distinctive aftertaste of rotting vegetables and soiled diapers.

Hello yon construction worker. Care you to partake in mine portable toilet burger? Sadly, it possesseth not the used-condom bouquet of my trash burgers, but you’ll find the accompanying buzzing of flies a synaesthetic delight of flavor!

The King can also increase his score by presenting food with flourish, which involves hitting a button at the right time to stop a meter. Again, given Burger King’s inexperience with games, I think we can understand how they’d include an option that makes the game look fancier without actually making it more fun. Not that we have to forgive them for it. The King has three levels of flourish (which vary from stage to stage), and no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, you still have to sit through every second of his stupid white-boy dance.

I imagine the Jaws theme playing here.

Adding even more unnecessary time onto the game, each of the four stages has twenty different missions. The developers tried their best to introduce variety into these challenges, but when playing a stealth game and getting the mission, “Let five people see you,” one tends to get the impression that the designers have checked out and just want to get paid their $3.99 (with the purchase of an extra value meal…later reduced to $0.99, for understandable reasons).

Sadly, the game really kept me amused for a few hours. Mostly, however, I attribute this to the novelty of the situation. It also felt somehow unique, and I liked the initial aspect of increasing scores, while it provided a rare example of a game without competitive aspects. (When researchers study violent games to “pro-social” games, I wonder if they use Sneak King as “pro-social.”) Still, about halfway through, the difficulty spiked by about a thousand times, which comes off more as poor design and testing than an intentional challenge curve, and by then the game had gotten repetitive enough, the flaws noticeable enough, and my constant battles with the camera obnoxious enough, that while I liked playing it for a little while, I would rather finish a large fries pulled from the King’s tights out of a garbage can than Sneak King.

But the creepy first-person mode, if nothing else, merits this game a spot in my WTF category.