Debuts videogame

like it. These sweet and silly touches are welcome relief from the game’s oppressive humour, which relies much too heavily on stereotypes and slurs.

South Park’s sense of humour has always been more confrontational than convivial, relying on crass defiance to stand in for cleverness and observation. Freud described this kind of humour as the ego’s way of insisting “that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for [the ego] to gain pleasure”. In a retrospective on the series in Entertainment Weekly, former Comedy Central President Doug Herzog recalled the panic he felt before the show premiered in 1997. “I bolted up in bed just nights before we put it on the air, in cold sweat,” he said, “I swear to God. I was like, ‘Wait, can I get arrested for this? Is this legal?’ “

Like the show, The Fractured but Whole seems engineered to make you feel like you’re getting away with something without being able to specify what exactly that is. Before you can start The Fractured but Whole, you’re asked to adjust New Kid’s skin tone on a slider, with a warning that playing with the darkest skin will increase the difficulty by having all the town’s residents treat you with even more hostility than they already do. In brisk 22-minute episodes, this kind of humour might pass as satire, but the punchlines sour when they’re spread out across a 20-hour video game. The jokes work as intended, but that rarely feels like a good thing.