Performance issues are a constant worry for video games, especially when it comes to PC titles. As individual PC specs vary wildly, troubleshooting can often feel unnecessarily awkward and obtuse—doubly so if you’re a layman. It’s also often a lot more logical to simply blame a game’s poor optimization or other issues with the programming for your technical woes.
However, I recently ran into an oddly specific performance-related problem during my playthrough of developer Froke’s automation sandbox game Project P.I.T.T.; is it fair to criticize a video game for reducing my framerate to the equivalent of a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow when I knowingly abused its mechanics in a bid to fill my screen with thousands of rubber duckies?
Project P.I.T.T. is a parody of the automation genre. Your goal is to feed the Maw, a giant pit at the center of an empty facility. The Maw craves products, and its hunger is insatiable. To get your faceless corporate overlords off your back, you’ll have to find creative ways to tip thousands of rubber duckies, cash registers, and piñatas into the Maw’s gullet.
The strongest tool in your arsenal is your grasp of physics. By building magnetized slides and fan-powered hallways, you can abuse the laws of physics to automate your facility in increasingly silly ways. Making yourself obsolete is the true end goal here. It’s a rather lengthy joke with a punchline that Project P.I.T.T. delivers perfectly: the video game wants you to stop playing the video game.
But while feeding your automatically crafted products into the Maw without lifting a finger is the ideal solution, I realized early in my playthrough that it’s not the most optimal one. Project P.I.T.T. features a combo mechanic, which multiplies the score of the products you feed into the Maw if done in quick succession. The higher your combo gets, the faster it degrades. This means your combo counter will eventually reset, regardless of how perfectly you automate your facility.
So, I decided to do things a bit differently. By blocking the Maw off from all angles and creating a holding cell for all of my products to sit in, I managed to hoard thousands of rubber duckies in one spot. I occasionally had to use my broom to sweep some of the stragglers back into position, but otherwise the plan was flawless.
Well…mostly flawless. I have a decent rig as far as PCs go: a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, an RTX 4080 graphics card, and 64GB of RAM that I am very lucky to have purchased several years ago. Project P.I.T.T. also isn’t a particularly demanding game, likely due to its PSX-style graphics. For 99 percent of my playthrough, Project P.I.T.T.’s performance was perfect. Unfortunately, my rubber ducky coop proved to be its undoing.
It’s impossible to tell which rubber ducky tipped Project P.I.T.T. over the edge, but I noticed somewhere around the 3,000 mark that my PC’s fans had begun spinning at a Beyblade-like speed. Not long before this, I’d noticed subtle framerate dips. It was borderline imperceptible at first. After rubber ducky number 5,000, however, I was hitting 10-frames-per-second territory.
It got so bad that, even though I’ve been playing video games for decades, I started to experience video game–induced motion sickness for the first time in my life. Even attempting to perceive the mess I’d created in Project P.I.T.T. made my eyes feel funny and triggered a weirdly tense feeling in my stomach, which became more pronounced the further my FPS dipped.
If I didn’t put an end to this madness soon, I was either going to hurl, or my PC was going to explode. So, I relented—or, at least, I tried to. My FPS had dipped into glacial drift territory, so maneuvering around my Rube Goldberg machine–like facility was both slow and painful. I grabbed my big broom and deleted the walls encapsulating the Maw, but the knock-on effect of disturbing the thousands of rubber duckies I’d collected tanked my framerate even harder. I could only watch in awe as the wall of ducks began to spill into the pit, one frame at a time.
Minutes passed. Things began to speed up as more and more ducks trickled into the Maw. Eventually, the mass had been excised. My combo counter barely hit 1,000. It was all for nothing.
But who is to blame for this charade? Should developer Froke have planned for this possibility, or could it be that I’m the one at fault here? The latter, I fear.
During my attempts to transform my PC into a personal space heater, I was reminded of this 14-year-old video of someone yeeting 5,000 cabbages across Skyrim and irreparably destroying their game in the process. Rewatching it made me realize that no developer should be expected to optimize their game with complete dipshits like me in mind, in much in the same way that Procter & Gamble can’t be blamed for producing Tide Pods that some perceive as delicious.
Project P.I.T.T. provided me with the tools, but it never instructed me to use them in the way that I did. I chose to plug the kitchen fork into the outlet all by myself—and honestly, I’d do it again. Actually, never mind—I just googled how much a new GPU would cost.
