Impressions: Penny Arcade: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness
Penny Arcade: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness has a lot of people-pleasing on its to-do list - fans of the web comic, fans of the Penny Arcade Expo, fans of Penny Arcade's history-making gaming charity Child's Play, and a boatload of Xbox 360 owners who raise a wary eyebrow at any XBLA release with a 1600 MP price tag.
Not to mention anyone who drools at the thought of playing a game that lampoons more gaming conventions, plotlines, and themes than you can shake a stick at.
Penny Arcade: OTRSPoD plays like a filthy-mouthed adventure game with RPG-ish combat, set in the 1920s-inspired city of New Arcadia, where giant robots and evil mimes with Lovecraftian ambitions war with hobos and barbershop quartets while Gabe, Tycho and the player character, Carl (or Carla) set off to do what's just, what's right, and what's naughty.
Make the jump for some judgment!
Penny Arcade: OTRSPoD's graphics, once the source of some premature speculation, are flat-out fierce: it looks as close to a moving, full-screen Penny Arcade comic as possible, and uses the comic theme as colorfully as possible: screen transitions and special attacks during combat are all interwoven with great art and production values that incorporate leaps of imagination while remaining well-edited.
All the dialog takes place in a pop-up frame that's essentially an interactive Penny Arcade comic, which is not only awesome but helps frame the game - what might otherwise be a flighty mess seems like it actually belongs to the Penny Arcade family, which is neat.
Combat could have been hand-picked from Final Fantasy style RPGs, with one of those quasi-real-time, sorta-turn-based mechanisms that has your guys on one side and the bad guys on the other, waiting for the chance to use items, attack, or unleash a special attack - each action taking longer, respectively, to charge. In other words, you can use healing and power-ups in relatively quick succession, while basic attacks come at a more steady pace and special attacks require even more patience.
Tycho wields and old-school firearm while keeping his nose in a book, Gabe and his famous fists stand ready to beat the piss out of bad guys, while Carl - whose home was destroyed by mysterious giant robots - fights with a rake.
The combat will cause problems for some gamers - it isn't the tightest system in the world and I couldn't fault anyone for calling it sloppy, but for what it's worth I enjoyed the combat system enormously. Power-ups are simple to use, healing and reviving is a simple process that could have been much worse, and combat itself is a fun, loose affair that's saved by its relative ease. Boost the difficulty by much and you'd ruin the game.
Special attacks appear as minigames - think God of War in Penny Arcade style: mash buttons to beef up Gabe's attacks, follow the button presses for Tycho, and timed presses for Carl's rake attacks. As the boys level up they gain new attacks, which are more challenging variants of the same.
Leveling up and developing your three characters also relies upon a tightly-balanced system - as you defeat various robots, you'll earn junk. The amount of junk in each location is displayed on the map, and you'll need every single piece to fully upgrade your team's weapons. There isn't a spare resource in the game, which is a good thing: this is a very focused story, and there isn't any point to wandering about aimlessly killing things.
Likewise, you'll max out at level 15, which is appropriate for the story and the gameplay. You can boost each character's attack power by completing kill moves with your special attacks, which is a pleasant surprise. In a game this heavily scripted, having some freedom to enhance your characters as you see fit feels like a bonus.
And the script deserves its own praise - this game could easily have been a sloppy mess pinned to a hysterically funny script, and Hothead Games deserves a lot of credit for making a game finely-tuned enough to let the script, penned by Jerry "Tycho" Holkins himself, stand out like the star it is.
From foul-mouthed humor to sarcastic asides to the unexpected charm of Tycho's anachronistic conversations with his lady niece, who serves as the game's technical guru and general plot-advancer. Penny Arcade fans will feel right at home, and newcomers won't feel shut out by in-jokes and jargon: I forced my boyfriend to play the demo on his 360 and it wasn't but two minutes before he piped up and said, "Ok, I get it!"
If the notion of dropping 1600 Microsoft Points on an episodic XBLA title doesn't appeal to you, snatch the demo and give it a shot - while it's even shorter than its episodic nature suggests, Penny Arcade: OTRSPoD is every inch a game worth playing. I found that I enjoyed the PC version of the game better, being more of a PC gamer than a console guy, but I'd recommend this adventure/RPG in just about any incarnation.
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Reviews, Video Games on 27 May 2008
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: episode one, hothead games, on the rain-slick precipice of darkness, pc, penny arcade, xbox 360
We tried to play the PC demo the other day and it kept bugging out. I'm hesitant to buy the full PC version in case it's equally buggy.
Maybe I'll finally hook the 360 up to the net and see about getting it via Live.
Got the Mac version, and I love it ever so. There's some kinks to be worked out but it's definitely worth the $20 for anyone who has ever laughed at a Penny Arcade strip.
Got the Mac version, and I love it ever so. There's some kinks to be worked out but it's definitely worth the $20 for anyone who has ever laughed at a Penny Arcade strip.