Well, I always wanted to be a computer game reviewer… 
I started out interested in playing the demo, at least. I’ve read Penny Arcade for years, chuckling maybe half the time at their comics, and I was fairly certain that the demo, at least, would be entertaining.
I ended up buying the game immediately after the demo was done. I did this for two reasons: first, I like the idea of supporting independent game design. I love the idea that a bunch of people can get together with a seriously niche, silly idea for a game, throw it online, and get people to pay for it. I donate to Tarn Adams and Jonathan Coulton for the same or similar reasons.
And the other reason? It was damn entertaining.
Gameplay is really a very console experience on a PC. Special attacks get upgraded throughout the game, and Tycho and Gabe’s special attacks in particular seemed geared toward the characters themselves, both in the game and the comic: while Tycho’s moves required careful precision and speed, Gabe’s mostly involved banging on a button a whole bunch of times as fast as possible like a rat pushing the kibble button. Combat is a little hairy, but it has the spark I enjoy in an RPG of this type: while it’s often challenging and near-constant, combat is not boring. It’s quite engaging, in fact, and a more enjoyable combat experience than I’ve had since Jade Empire.
Character creation is simple – you don’t pick classes or stats or anything other than what you look like. And yet this is, in its own way, important. Glasses or no glasses won’t help you win the game, but when the character I designed ended up in cutscenes, in silhouettes, in conversation seamless with the rest of the game… I think this may well be one of the best parts of the game itself. For the first time I felt like a character I’d created was a real part of the game world, interacting on an equal basis with her rather familiar cohorts.
The humor is very Penny Arcade – you pass a Wang’s Chinese food restaurant, the very first critter you run across is checks forum one of those rogue juicers who seems inclined to do obscene things to your leg, and one of the necessary ingredients to finishing the game is acquired by a rather stinky man who… well, modesty and good manners forbid, but I don’t blame Gabe for being squeamish, no matter how powerful the stuff makes him. But the story and the aura are also successfully creepy. A gigantic fellow stuffing bums into a sack and dragging them off for Nefarious Purposes Unknown is just demented, but the other things in his lair are, while obscenely funny in their own right, are also rather frightening. The sequence later in the game with a fortune-teller actually sent shivers down my spine, yet even in the bright colors and satirical bent of the game the twenties horror-novel bent is not out of place.
That’s the clever part, in fact. The humor is very modern, as is much of the dialogue. It’s peppered with profanities and sounds like an extended episode of the comic, and yet it melds this beautifully into a Lovecraft-style story even as it pokes gentle fun at the genre itself.
I’ve said enough good things about the game. Now to the annoying:
Combat does eventually get tedious. It’s not really that hard – I’m not an expert gamer but I only got the whole party killed twice throughout the game – but corralling three party members against sometimes quite numerous enemies can be a little cumbersome. I don’t much care for JRPG combat in general (though I like the little shout-outs to the old summoner classes. Yuna only wishes she had Fuschia in that stick of hers) and I especially dislike twitch-style JRPG combat. I did like the mini-game-like use of special attacks and the style was used to the best effect possible, but it’s like riding the very prettiest most elegant unicycle. On one hand, it’s the best damn unicycle you’re going to find. On the other hand, it’s a damn unicycle.
The game is very, very, very linear. After a very early point it’s always possible to go everywhere, but the world is very small. It does make gameplay less confusing, but replayability would consist most of “I wonder what a guy would look like saying exactly the same lines as the girl I played did?”
The $20 pricetag hurts a little for a game I’m probably not going to play again for a while – or, at least, not play to finish. Still, it was at least six straight hours of entertainment. I like the genre, I like the game, and I’ll buy the next one when it comes out.
