On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One
Video games, webcomics about video games, video games about webcomics about video games, webcomics about video games about webcomics about video games. What a world!
Penny Arcade’s mouthful of a game is, as you’d expect, aimed squarely at fans of the comic. It’s an adventure/RPG hybrid whose pleasure comes not from the gameplay itself, but from following the oddball story and clicking on every last object to read the descriptions. From the first unnecessary italicization it’s clear that Tycho’s fingerprints are all over this thing; every line of text is witty, unabashedly vulgar, and gleefully overwritten in the Penny Arcade tradition. Gabe has left his mark as well; though I’m not sure I was fully convinced by the 3D world, the 2D dialogue menus and comic-book-style cutscenes kept Precipice firmly grounded in the PA universe.
It’s a good thing the humor works so well, because while the game is fun the mechanics are ultimately unremarkable. The meat of the gameplay is in the battle system, which has a lot to like — the overkill bonus, the frenetic special moves, the blessedly simple item mechanics. By the second half of the game, though, I was steamrollering over everything in my way; I think I could have beaten the final boss if he had had twice as many hit points. As I learned with Grandia II, it’s hard to appreciate a good battle mechanic when the difficulty curve bends in the wrong direction. Add in the disappointingly linear adventure elements and weak customizability, and I’m not convinced the game would hold together without the Penny Arcade license.
As it is, though, I think it does hold together — as with No More Heroes, the gameplay works well enough, but it really isn’t the main draw. For fans of Gabe and Tycho’s unique brand of humor, Precipice delivers in spades.
You know, this is going to drive me crazy. My backlog is already stacked higher than my TV platform, and even with the summer doldrums beginning more games keep getting added to the list. I hope I can cram this in somewhere before the fall deluge begins.
I know what you mean. The nice thing about these short episodic titles is that they’re good impulse buys — relatively cheap, and you can plow through them in a day or two.