Black Mirror's Bandersnatch was an ambitious and slickly produced experiment in interactive TV, presenting an episode of the series in the form of a choose-your-own adventure with multiple possible storylines and endings.
Aunty Donna's Bandersketch is… well, a lot sillier. The popular Australian comedy group's parody version invites you to help them write a new sketch under a looming deadline, without getting distracted by lunch, Gangnam Style, or sudden unexpected death.
It's not quite as elaborate as I was hoping, but it's still well worth playing through to see how many bizarre game overs you can get. One of the choices you can make just sends you off on a 40-minute unskippable walk around Melbourne and you've got respect the sheer stupidity of that.
If you're not familiar with Aunty Donna, they do great work—not only producing their own sketch comedy, but also running Grouse House, a platform for other comedians in the Australian alternative comedy scene. I'm particularly fond of their excruciatingly impossible guessing game MUGG, which mines laughs out of what is essentially a series of mental breakdowns.
It's clear as well that games are a big inspiration for them—a previous video saw them playing through a live-action videogame that somehow turned into an excuse to drink an inadvisable amount of milkshakes.
Bandersketch seems to have been made to help promote their new Grouse House TV subscription service—very much following in the footsteps of Dropout in attempting to fund comedy videos away from YouTube. If you enjoy it, maybe check out what they've got on offer. If not… well, frankly, I hope YouTube sends an evil entity to steal your soul and add it to their collection of the damned.
