South Park
FEW things can potentially infect a child’s imagination with anxiety like the phrase, “We’re moving.” What if your new classmates hate you, or your next house is haunted? Worse yet, what if your family moves to South Park? That misfortune befalls the star of South Park: The Fractured but Whole, a young child of no particular race, religion or gender (you can select all three). The townspeople insist on the name “New Kid” even though it’s been more than three years since his, her or their first appearance in 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth, which translated Comedy Central’s long-running series into a roleplaying game so simple that it appears to be playing itself for long periods of time.
There’s a sense of meanness in the omission. It’s not just that nobody knows your name, it’s that no one cares to know, and they all want to make a point of not knowing. Then again, detached cruelty is all part of the show in South Park, and there are more important things to worry about, including farts so foul they reverse the flow of time, a belligerent stripper named Classi, and a plot to poison the town’s supply of drugs and alcohol with cat urine.
The game opens where Stick of Truth ended, with the neighbourhood kids role-playing medieval warfare using cardboard swords and molten lava formed from red LEGO bricks. Cartman interrupts the battle at its peak, and demands Kyle, Craig, New Kid and the rest of the gang give up their halberds and don superhero costumes to help him search for a missing cat called Scrambles. There’s a $100 reward, and Cartman, in costume as The Coon, a raccoon clawed crusader first introduced in Season 13, is confident it will be enough to launch their own franchise of movies, TV shows and merchandise and make them all richer than Bruce Wayne. Not everyone wants to work with Cartman though, so the kids are riven into two competing groups of heroes, the Cartman-led Coon and Friends and the Freedom Pals led by Timmy, famous only for being able to shout his first name over and over but here transformed into a telekinetic genius in a wheelchair.
The game’s turn-based combat takes place on long grids with slapstick attacks and status effects unique to each character. Wendy’s alter ego, Call Girl, comes equipped with a selfie stick and array of cellphones she uses to unleash social media mobs, which attack enemies in a stampede. New Kid’s superpower is flatulence, which he uses to poison enemies in battle and to solve puzzles around town. This special power can be used to clear away the LEGO-block-lava that blocks certain paths or launch a hamster covered in tinfoil into electrical panels to open locked doors and disable sentry turrets.
The game is most charming when it foregoes toilet gags for a simpler satire of suburban adolescence. Combat sequences are sometimes interrupted for a passing car, as if conflict between superheroes were as trivial as a game of touch football. One late-game battle captures the pleasant weightless of children’s imaginations, with an enemy that changes the rules of engagement in the middle of each turn and grants himself extra turns whenever he feels