Lovecraftian tomfoolery!

Fear the Silent One!

Penny Arcade is just recently celebrating their tenth year of publication.  They've done an incredible number of things in those years, including their insanely popular webcomic, a huge charity event in Child's Play, and .a huge gaming annual gaming convention in the Penny Arcade Expo.

Well, color me envious that they get to spend their lives and careers in such a comical and, at least to them, lucrative fashion, but it's hard to get too irritable when their material is so absurdly enjoyable.  In and among their many contributions, they have in the last months seen the release of their own game: The Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness.

Like many other games today, they've decided to put theirs out in episodic format, which is to say shorter gamers more frequently (not that VALVe can figure that out), and currently they have he first two episodes available for purchase.

This game is, very simply put, a great deal of fun.  The story is an odd derivation of Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror, not quite a parody.  It follows the story of you, or more specifically a character representation of you that you create.  One brisk morning, you emerge from your home on Desperation St. just as it is crushed beneath the heel of an enormous robot with a disturbing predilection towards fruit.

You watch as the huge machine is followed by none other than John Gabriel and Tycho Brahe (the main characters from the PA comic strip).  You meet up with them and form an RPG style fighting party, which endures for both episodes (and probably the others as well).  The rest of the story, sans spoilers, involves ancient evils, mimes, and a simultaneous intrigue and hilarity that few games attain.

The combat is a simplistic RPG-style of wait until a bar charges and attack.  Each character, however, has 3-tiers of attack, that charge in order.  The first is items (which are all very strange), the second is a basic attack, and the third is a special attack.  The special attack causes your character to enter some minigame, each successful button press causing greater damage to your unfortunate foes, which range from mimes and mental patients to giant spiders, clowns, and barbershop quartets.  Oh, and lest we forget the giant wooden mime with a familiar squidlike face that houses the ancient god Yog Sethis, the Silent One.

Everything in the game has the flair and style of the Penny Arcade comic.  All of the writing and dialogue was done by Jerry Holkins (Tycho), and the in-game sequences and artwork concepts were done by Mike Krahulik (Gabe).  Hundreds of objects from ice-cream cones to posters to small crabs can be clicked on, revealing some hilarious tidbit.  The dialogue is also very well done and consistently funny.

Now, admittedly, I am a Penny Arcade fan, so all of this resonates quite efficiently with me.  How will it stack up with someone who doesn't like them?

Well, the combat system is fairly simplistic, so hardcore RPG fans will likely be unimpressed.  The entire thing is coated in the comic strip style satire with a number of inside jokes.  That having been said it is not necessary to have read the strip beforehand; the characters are developed and the story original enough to draw most people in.

Conversely though, if you happen to hate Penny Arcade, burn effigies of Div and Anne Claire in the woods at night, have many slashed up prints of Twisp and Catsby adorning the walls of your grandmother's basement, and regularly spam the creators with hatemail...

There's a decent chance you might not like the game too much.  Maybe.

For everyone else it's a lot of fun (for not much cash) with an interesting premise and execution with many moments of sheer, unbridled hilarity to be had throughout the experience.