At the web comic Cyanide & Happiness over the 16 years of its existence, a large army of fans has accumulated, which gladly buys assorted merchandise and consumes the cartoon series, which is significantly inferior in humor. Unsurprisingly, the authors decided to go further and create a successful game, but the first run with a battle royale Rapture rejects turned out to be a complete failure. Second try with Kickstarterclearly inspired South parkis already fighting on the Point ’n Click adventure field, inviting players to experience the harsh life of a high school student named Coop.
The protagonist lives with his grandmother, who produces porn for a nursing home, he is surrounded by bullies and losers, and the school resembles films from the 90s about the harsh life in Harlem. All of these fragments of life are filled with unsuited and useless content, most of which you may not even notice while playing the game.
Assuming, apparently, that the players are crazy about a lot of details, the authors from Skeleton Crew Studios provided the hero with three possibilities of interaction with the outside world. He can not only combine items in the inventory, but also inspect the area, talk and take many small objects into his backpack, some of which may be useful for the development of the plot. Naturally, on each screen, and there are several dozen of them in the game, there are hundreds of active points for interaction.
There are a lot of items in Cyanide & Happiness – Freakpocalypse, and the authors explain this abundance by the non-linearity of the gameplay. You can distract the secretary or get an important pencil for the plot in completely different ways, which should give freedom of expression. In the first case, you can re-glue the food or get two guys to kiss. But this does not make it easier for the player. Enumerating options takes time, some tasks are devoid of logic, and certain objects require interaction several times – this is the subtle humor of the game. At the same time, the state of dialogues and sketches can be described as a set of garbage jokes that are understandable only to readers of the original comic or to people from a very distant past. What is just a parody of a package from the movie “American beauty” with Kevin Spacey, about which everyone has long forgotten. All other sketches and sharp dives in dialogues follow a similar route.
Side quests to find love for a girl crying in the toilet, markers for a drug addict and other predictable trash do not cause much enthusiasm, and the save system does not allow you to return after completing the main plot and complete missed or postponed missions.
Cyanide & Happiness pulls out a bit – Freakpocalypse only has cute graphics and the ability to dress up the main character in clothes found in different spaces of the vast world. But this quickly becomes boring, as pixel hunting simply destroys all exposure and mood.
