The best medicine

We expect games to tax the brain and test the reflexes, but only rarely do they tickle the funnybone while they’re at it – not for the right reasons, anyway. Yet this month’s Play crop yields a selection of games that not only make us laugh, but also remind us how hard a thing humour is to get right in a medium where the player can’t help but get in the way. If, as they say, timing is truly everything in comedy, delegating control to an uncooperative thirdparty is simply asking for trouble.

In Lair Of The Clockwork God (p120), developer Dan Marshall returns to the classic point-and-click adventure stylings of his early Ben and Dan games. This was one of the first genres to really get humour right, and little wonder: player input is minimal, and the script is everything. Similarly, in Zombie Army 4: Dead War, (p114) a schlocky B-movie setting, to say nothing of the gruesome Nazi nut-shot cinematics it borrows from the Sniper Elite series, all but mandates that it be played for laughs. Layer in the sort of hilarity that naturally emerges in co-op when guns and goo are involved, and Rebellion is on to a winner.

We find a similar spirit in Bloodroots (p110), a game of serious difficulty that lightens the tone with a script peppered with swearing and an improvisational weapon toolset that lets you use everything from a fencepost to a cabbage to stove the enemy’s heads in. Yet when it comes to pure comedy, none of the aforementioned can hold a candle (or four) to Journey To The Savage Planet (p106). Typhoon’s debut game uses humour as a foundational principle in every aspect: its script, its mechanics, its look and sound and feel. It’s not perfect, certainly. But it is quite the proof of concept. In a real world that gets bleaker by the day, the more that videogames can lighten the tone, the better.