Love them or hate them, Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik have become the voices of gamers and the game industry. In some ways, they are the bridge between the players and the developers. They aren’t really journalists, they don’t feel the pressures that “game journalists” do. They will call out a company on their crap. In some ways, a Penny Arcade game makes perfect sense. These guys know what they like in a game and (to some extent) what the average gamer is looking for. At the same time, it was a pretty ballsy decision. If it flops (critically or in sales terms), every single person that they’ve pissed off will get their chance at revenge.

Is it a flop? Are we about to fall off of the rain-slick precipice of crappy games? Read on a bit further and find out.

Alright, you didn’t need to read very far. Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 1: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (gasp for breath) succeeds as both a marvelous satire and as a fun role-playing experience. Of course, this comes with a small warning. If you don’t like Penny Arcade or, more specifically, Jerry’s writing, you probably won’t dig the game. It is a role-playing game, you will be doing a lot of reading. On the other hand, if you are a Penny Arcade fan, you will absolutely devour this game. Every single quality that makes the comic strip awesome makes its way into the game in some form.

To describe PAAE1OtRSPoD (I really need a better way of shortening that) as a multiple hour Penny Arcade strip would be a disservice to the world that they’ve created. No, it isn’t just one gaming joke after another. The comic creators have actually forged a setting heavily influenced by the Lovecraftian mythos, steampunk, and modern fantasy while still remaining true to the comic’s roots. It still comes across as humorous, as satire, but it doesn’t fall prey to the flaw that many other parodies share. Rain-Slick Precipice’s world and its storyline actually stand on their own. I would happily read a separate comic series or novel set in PAA’s “New Arcadia.” Penny Arcade fans will enjoy the numerous nods to older comic strips. You roll a D20 for initiative, you fight Fruit Fuckers, Tycho uses big words and Gabe is violent.

True to its comic-strip origins, Penny Arcade Adventures sports an awesome cell-shaded art style. It could look better, but the in-game graphics are colorful and attractive. It’s easy to tell what’s what on the screen, and the character models look decent. In other words, it reaches a comfortable point on the scale of graphics vs system requirements. The artwork shines during cutscenes and conversations, where the in-game engine transfers over to Mike’s hand-drawn artwork. The animated introduction alone made me long for a Penny Arcade cartoon series. One cool touch is that your customized character also appears in the “comic” portions with all of the settings intact. This does inherently limit the amount of customization that you can do to your avatar, and I would have liked a few more options there. Still, I think the tradeoff is worth it.

Fans of Nintendo’s portable Mario & Luigi RPGS will feel right at home with Penny Arcade Adventures. The battle system, while turn-based, places a pretty heavy emphasis on timing. If you press the trigger button at just the right time, you can block (or even counter) enemy attacks. By waiting long enough, your characters can perform special attacks based on timed button presses. Your avatar has a special attack that does more damage by hitting buttons when they line up with the hands of a clock. Gabe winds up his punches and strikes at the right moment. Tycho’s special move relies on you hitting the right buttons in sequence. By saving special attacks until the right moment, your party members can team up for group attacks. You will also find support characters throughout your journey that can unleash special attacks every so often. Items are pretty standard rpg-fare. You have your healers, your performance-boosters, and performance-lowering items to use on the enemies. There are also some fun distraction items that prevent enemies from doing anything for awhile (oranges for Fruit Fuckers, invisible boxes for Mimes).

If anything, my main complaint about Rain-Slick Precipice is that there isn’t more of it. It didn’t feel like I covered much ground over those few hours. Part of that feeling is that you don’t actually do all that much. You fight the same enemies over and over, and there are only two boss battles. I don’t think you do quite enough to make it feel like a self-contained episode. What it felt like was the opening hours of a role-playing game. In some ways, I wonder if role-playing games make for good episodic titles. When you play an RPG, you expect a long game with an epic scope. Penny Arcade Adventures has all of the ingredients of an RPG. Hell, it is a fantastic RPG. It just doesn’t feel quite right as a self-contained episode. It reminds me a lot of the .hack games on PS2. Similarly, once the entire series is out, I imagine it will fell like a complete game. However, it doesn’t work in quite the same way as the Half-Life episodes or the Sam & Max series, where each episode does feel like a complete “episode.”

Penny Arcade Adventures does earn its mature rating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much cursing in a game. Likewise, it’s pretty gory for such a cartoon-like game. Your fallen enemies leave puddles of blood. Not a problem for most gamers, but you still might not want to play this in front of any kids. I kind of appreciate the fact that they aren’t watering it down. They seem to be setting up the Penny Arcade Adventures series as an “Adult Swim” approach to game design. This is a game for adults (alright, for mid-twenties guys), and they aren’t compromising on that. Don’t play the game if you are offended by cursing, gore, hobos, mime-slaying, blasphemous dark gods, etc (the list goes on).

Regardless of your feelings on the comic strip or the guys who make it, I think that Penny Arcade Adventures does certain things that are desperately needed in this industry. They refused to compromise on content or distribution (they basically told GameStop to screw themselves), and they made the game that they wanted to play. In order to get the game out to a wider audience, the developers have put out Linux and Mac versions of the episode (something that is definitely not the norm). I salute them for having the cojones to make those decisions, and I hope that other developers take notice. If you’re looking for a fun little RPG and have an appreciation for Cthulhu, steampunk, or Adult Swim, I can’t recommend this episode enough. I don’t think that $20 is too much to ask for six to eight hours of playtime when those hours are better than similarly-lengthed $60 games.

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