Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop joins the proud pantheon of video games where people are going to buy it based on the name alone. With such prestigious progenitors as Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015 and Baobab’s Mausoleum, Episode 1: Ovnifagos Don’t Eat Flamingos, a title gets the foot in the stall door, so to speak. You’ll find any number of odd titles floating around Steam and raising a stink because the name is more than Braid or LIMBO or whatever one word title makes an indie shine. But the question is: can a game with such a nutty concept rise to the top of the water line, or will it merely sink and be forgotten?

Though the game’s name gives you the basics, Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop is a combination of short-form minigames and equally short visual novel aspects. You, a hapless pleb in some office somewhere, need to poop, but you also have a boss calling to give you the business and tell you about an important meeting. The idea is thus: listen to as much of the boss’ prattle as you can, dash to the toilet, enter and clean up the stall, and then find relief. Afterward, you need to give a presentation styled from the aforementioned phone call and do your best to recall all the information provided when your mind was decidedly elsewhere.

I can’t tell if he’s a psychopath or a genius.

I’ll be blunt: this is a one-and-done game that has all the charm of a dirty joke that your uncle tells at the family cookout. Sure, you’ll definitely laugh as long as it’s not about hating women (why do we all have one family member who thinks misogyny is comedy?), but you wouldn’t want to hear the same joke again, and you’ll probably be reluctant to tell another person unless you know them well. I remember people recommending South Park to anyone who would listen when the show made a splash around the late 90s, and a lot of people, my mother included, being horrified at the execution and comedic beats. Yes, my father laughed so hard he fell off the sofa and that is a dear memory for me, but it doesn’t change that some funny ideas simply don’t land for everyone.

For what it’s worth Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop hits a lot of notes relatively well. There’s plenty of good art in an overly cartoonish style that supports the main character, all of his coworkers, his disconnected boss, and, of course, the bathroom itself. Surprisingly, the art design is one of the few places where it DOESN’T feel like the direction went over the top in terms of what you’re seeing. Yes, there’s a minigame where you’re cleaning up a toilet before you can sit down on it (more on that in a moment), but it’s mostly mellow yellow and, sadly, chunky green when you reflexively vomit from touching someone else’s urine. But a lot of the design is really solid, and I was particularly pleased with the anime-inspired activities of either rock-scissors-paper or a Dragon Ball parody to kick in a stall door.

There’s so much going on in this picture and I am opting to explain none of it.

If, for any reason, you are offended by foul language, you’re going to need to pass on this game entirely. Filled with profanity both inflammatory and casual, I made the mistake of firing up this game in front of my ten year old and the giggles were nonstop, along with the occasional interjection about “they said the F word.” Yes, they certainly did say the F word a lot, but none of it was sexual, so I guess that makes this PG-13? As a “dark comedy” tagged title, it was certain to have some things go blue, but it exceeded my expectations. Having my boss casually add “oh, and don’t fuck this up” before hanging up the phone (in the same tone as “I’m going to the fridge, do you want something?”) was a level that I wasn’t quite ready for.

I argue the strongest point of Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop is the visual novel aspect. Before pooping, the boss will have a multi-part conversation that you can, in theory, duck out of at any time. While it compromises your “clench strength,” listening to the entirety of his diatribe is essential for the post-poop conference. He tends to meander wildly, and will throw in things that need to be in the presentation, but have nothing to do with the actual topic at hand. For example, his take on providing unlimited breadsticks, soup, and salad in order to help the workforce also includes sinister notes about taking control of the populous through being overfed on cheap food. There are seven scenarios, so don’t assume you can guesswork your way through one on confidence alone. I mean, you can eventually, but good luck memorizing everything.

What’s truly bananas is at least two of these could be the correct answer.

In that same vein, there’s actually a good amount of reading comprehension that comes hand in hand, as you won’t say the same things the boss tells you word for word. When he unveils his plan to solve school hunger by serving stray cats to children, he seems to needlessly mention Mozart and an orchestra of children bone flutes. This borderline psychotic aside is critical for you to remember as a comment about “Mozart helps people be less stupid, so let’s give children flutes from cat bones.” I can’t fully recommend this as reading prep for the SATs, but I also can’t not recommend it, so prep for your future however you think is best.

A majority of the time in Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop is centered around the minigames, which have a give-and-take enjoyment rate. The episodes are very short, usually only taking a minute or so each, and ask for mouse input for most. The one exception is a run and punch where you need to assault coworkers while dashing for the toilet, and that game is decidedly the worst. While it has the potential to be fun, the physics and speed make it a bit unwieldy and irregular, causing players to run into acquaintances and water boilers, and, as a result, need to do a saving throw not to poop your pants in the middle of the hallway.

Other games, like hurling coffee cups to empty the corridor or rapidly poking at the eyeballs of the local stall peeper, are amusing enough, but they don’t really have longevity or replayability. Sure, you can unlock these games for the minigame arcade after beating them three times, but the question then becomes why? The title WarioWare is dropped into the Steam page, but there are only six quick games to speak of. You can unlock everything in well under a half hour, particularly if you don’t mind failing the speaking presentation, and you don’t necessarily need practice to get better at your own high score. Once you realize the opponent’s hand flashes the color they’re about to choose before throwing rock-scissors-paper, the strategic complexity goes out of the window.

This unironically is one of my favorite screenshots of the last year.

Outside of that all, Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop is a short joke, not overpriced or overstaying its welcome, but is decidedly hard to motivate players into unlocking everything. There are twenty achievements,  with the final being “get all other achievements,” and this could be done in probably two hours or so, by my estimation. Streamers might find an audience who enjoys the protagonist screaming “My dick!” after running into a coworker at full speed, but the “dark” humor is more of a beige. It’s not awfully offensive, and it stays in its lane for the duration of play, so it gets the job done without overstaying its welcome. Get ready for the next gag gift that’ll be passed around during the summer sale; this game will surely be the go-to for anyone looking to gas their friends with good-natured, if crude, humor.

Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Please Leave Me Alone, I Need to Poop was provided by the publisher.