Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1

Conclusion

How good of a game is Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One? Besides having the longest name we can recall, we feel the game is entertaining and worth checking out for all the computer geeks of the world. If you focus on the first two words of the title, it will probably tell you a lot about whether or not you will enjoy this game. To paraphrase a recent posting by Tycho, we could simply say, "If you like Penny Arcade, then you will like Penny Arcade Adventures - that's a tautology most people should be able to grasp." However, Penny Arcade Adventures isn't exactly the same as the Penny Arcade webcomic, so it's not a perfect tautology.

If you have no idea what Penny Arcade is about, a good place to start would be visiting their website and reading some of their past comics. Unlike many traditional comics, you can find the entire catalog of Penny Arcade at the website, dating all the way back to November 1998 and the glory of SiN load times. Not every comic is laugh out loud funny, and some people will be offended by the site's content. We can say with reasonable assurance that if you find the Penny Arcade website offensive, you will also be offended by the game. Proceed at your own discretion.

Another option that's nice to have for testing had a game is the freely available demo. That might give you an idea of whether or not the game is something you would enjoy; however, we have a few reservations about coming to a final judgment based on the demo. The main one is that the demo is full of a running narrative providing a bit of background information as well as a brief tutorial. It is very likely that some people will look at the demo and think, "I'm getting really tired of the narrator!" Thus it is important to mention that the narrator pretty much disappears at the point where the demo ends.

Where does Precipice fall in relation to other games? It's not at the technological level of any major RPG of recent history (i.e. Oblivion), and neither does it have the complexity of most PC RPGs. The gameplay has more in common with console RPGs, and any "role-playing" is decidedly light. What you're getting is a story that involves the Penny Arcade characters, dressed up in a low-cal RPG sauce. While there's a lot of combat, the game feels like an adventure in some respects, so there are parallels to games like Sam & Max. If you are entertained by the Sam & Max episodes, I think there's a reasonable chance that you'll like Precipice. It's not that the two are very similar, but I got about the same amount of enjoyment from Precipice as I get from a Sam & Max episode… and I certainly laughed more during Precipice.

In short, Precipice isn't the type of game that's going to turn the industry on its head. It really brings nothing new to the medium, being content to provide a relatively short but still entertaining "RPG-lite" experience. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as what's provided is worth playing. Several of us enjoyed the game, but at least one editor here felt it was pretty dull and my 14-year-old nephew told me it was "stupid". (Ed: But who actually trusts the opinion of a 14-year-old boy!?) It's not an expensive game, at least, and it won't take you months to complete; worst case, you're out $20 if you buy it and don't like it. I played it and enjoyed the setting, characters, plot, and most of the game mechanics. Sign me up for Episode Two; hopefully the release schedule will be more in line with the Sam & Max episodes than with Valve's Half-Life approach.