#23. Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One
Which is a mouthful of a title, but bear with me.
I bought this game on release out of a quite naturally-placed loyalty to Penny Arcade. It’s my opinion, and I can say this with absolute sincerity, that PA makes some of the most intelligent, insightful commentary on games right now, more so than many academics that I read. Plus, they can say “shitballs” while they’re doing it. Good times all around.
That said, PAA:OtRSPoD:Ep1* was one of the casualties of last year’s academic crunch, and I didn’t get around to it until this past weekend. Which is a blessing, really, since I can now move directly into Episode 2. I thoroughly enjoyed this game – it’s not perfect, and every now and then it’s a bit glitchy, but it’s rare that a game actually makes me laugh. Challenge is easy, adrenaline even easier. Honest, dialogue-centric fun? It’s been a long time since I’ve been anxious to see a cut scene or followed every dialogue path without thinking, “Hell, this better be worth it.” It’s been an even longer time since a punchline in a game has made me laugh. For the humor alone, it’s worth it.
And it’s not simple humor, some to think of it. There’s a great deal of literary allusion, not to titles or characters but to worlds, themes, and styles. Much of this comes from the overblown “dark apathy” of H.P.Lovecraft, the grand, stylized epics of Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard, or the gleeful anachronisms of steam-punk – too often referenced without irony by thousands of hack-imitators, imitated in turn by too many game writers. Yes, you can fight the great evil that threatens us all – but do it in a world with animated trashcans, a hobo king that fights with a sack full of other hobos, the Silent Pope of the mimes, urinologists, singing garbage men, exploding clowns, devious barber shop quartets, a boardwalk full of highly-inappropriate carnival games, and that infamous juicing robot, the FF-2000. Much like Penny Arcade itself, this is style writ large. Much of the world is described in Tycho’s voice: self-aware, overwrought, desperately serious, an homage and a satire on all those pulp- or pop-culture artifacts that we love in spite of ourselves, not to mention a perfect foil for the lowbrow, puerile, aggressive, and often surprisingly innocent Gabe. It’s a clever stylistic pairing, and one that hits the perfect tone for fans of the comic.
I’ll admit too that I’m a sucker for the traditional, turn-based RPG combat. Give me a line of my guys, a line of bad guys, and some semblance of weapon-upgrading or attack strategy and I’m happy - the setting is hardwired in from my youthful obsession with the canon of golden-age RPGs. With the current crop (I’m looking at you, Eternal Sonata), the problem is always story. As a player and a narratologist, I play to find out what happens next, and the banal, hopelessly juvenile offerings of this generation of consoles has me turning to other genres for my narrative fix – even to the dreaded Console First Person Shooter, one of my least favorites. And yet Bioshock and Dead Space are in my current XBOX 360 rotation**. I miss deep, intelligent, thoughtful stories in RPGs; I’ve grown out of many of the games I used to play, and the ones that still seem worthwhile are harder to play because I expect more from both game design and technology than we had in the mid-nineties. Penny-Arcade Adventures is by no means deep or thoughtful in the traditional sense, but it is intelligent. It is absolutely absurd, and revels in its absurdity. And it’s strikingly well-crafted as well, from a design standpoint – small technical glitches aside. With writing this good, I’m not going to quibble about a few path-finding issues.
I’ll also say that there’s a certain attraction for me in short, 3-5 hour games, things that can be finished in a weekend or an afternoon. Fallout 3 has been on my list of games I’m playing for a long time now, and I’m nowhere close to finishing it. In fact, I’ll often turn to something else, knowing that I only have an hour or two in which to play, and not wanting to get so deep into something that it’s difficult to turn off. I’m also struggling with playing a long experience in such short chunks, like reading half a chapter at a time. I look forward to PAA: Episode 2 because I know I can start and finish it this coming Saturday, if I so choose, and that the time will be well-spent. I’m certainly of the generation that likes both guarantees and (relatively) instant-gratification – don’t get me started on MMO reward systems – but it’s a good thing in this case.
One last thing: the classic adventure game, which Penny Arcade Adventures certainly draws from, can be funny but runs the risk of also being frustratingly arbitrary, particularly when it comes to puzzles or “riddles”. The team at Hothead Games has walked a very fine line here: the game is easy to follow, not difficult to finish but still engaging, and hilarious in the vein of the best Penny-Arcade comics – but never random. Everything ties togther in a way that makes contextual sense, and this isn’t an easy world to make sense of. Funny, absurdist, and logical. Well done, gentlemen.
In other words – man, fuck these giant evil robots. *cracks knuckles* Let’s go make some friends.
*Doesn’t that look great as an acronym?
**Why I didn’t just buy these on PC? Call it a dependence on GameStop and their wonderful 3 for 2 sales. Hopefully my shiny new Steam account will help with that.
