"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on in this oddball "comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™ and Sentient Martinis."
It was when the boss took a trip to the "wine cellar" after handing Agent Polyblank his pill to start the first espionage mission, the boss promptly proceeding to climb under his desk and go to sleep, that things got strange in Jazzpunk. That's about one minute in, by the way. Quickly after that, there was a strange character talking about MacGuffins in the park; a rigged game of mini-golf with a genuinely threatening accountant; and several versions of Hunter S Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke wandering around a beach.
Let's start over. Jazzpunk is a first-person adventure from a warped imagination. You are Agent Polyblank. Strange things keep happening. Your missions are pills. Solve the mission by finding clues and completing puzzles. Or just wander around and do things – click on things, talk to things, eat things. These things often lead to in jokes, strange surreal scenes and games-within-a-game, classic pastiches of retro videogames.
Talking to a frog becomes a game of traffic-dodging Frogger – fail and you're booted back to Jazzpunk, where the frog is now wearing a plaster cast. Opening a wedding cake on the beach becomes a game of Wedding Quake – the classic first-person shooter reskinned with cakes for guns and enemies in top hats. Eventually, somehow, you solve the mission.
Hang on a minute, now you're in your boss's intestines; now, you're roasting a pig to enter a strange code tunnel created by a paranoid hacker; now you're covering a menacing thug in fried eggs. Now it's all over, bar the flashbacks. Puerile at times, defiantly low-resolution, not quite as smart as The Stanley Parable, Jazzpunk is both an intriguing brain workout and a lot of fun, at the very least.
- Jazzpunk is out now for PC. Developed and published by Necrophone Games
- Read other gaming reviews on theartsdesk
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