On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Mac, Hothead Games, 2008
On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is the first episode of the game inspired by Penny Arcade, the world’s most popular gaming comic. It is a game where you can distract robots by throwing oranges at them, whereupon they are overcome with passion, plunge their juice chutes into the moist orange flesh, and pump their steely hips.
If this doesn’t appeal to you, do not read the rest of this review. Also, we probably shouldn’t be friends.
The game begins when a giant robot steps on your house. Set on revenge, your rake-wielding protagonist must ruthlessly destroy the aforementioned fruit-fuckers, hobos, clowns, evil mimes, evil flying mimes, and an evil giant mime with tentacles where its face should be. You are ably assisted in this endeavor by the machine gun-toting Tycho Brahe and his bare-knuckled pet simian, John Gabriel. At one stage, you are required to acquire a 1/64th replica of a ferris wheel and carry it to a man who has donated his life to his peculiar research.
Then he pees on it.
So, basically, this game is awesome.
Unfortunately, though there’s evidence that some effort was made on gender issues, it isn’t quite there yet.
Female avatars don’t have as much room for tweaking as the male ones; you get two body shapes as opposed to three, two eye shapes as opposed to a bunch, two choices of mouth shape (with optional lip colour change – that’s nice) and no eyebrow changes. Boring! However, the skin colour of your avatar can be anything from pale peach to medium brown – no dark browns, which is annoying, but you still have the option of a non-white female character.
However, where the game really falls down gender-wise is in the incidental characters who help or hinder you. Tycho’s niece, Anne-Claire, is a brilliant scientist, and your best guide to the ongoing story (not to mention a dab hand with a flamethrower), and the remodeled robot Fuchsia has feminine characteristics, but where are the rest of the female characters? Apart from the wandering extras, every other character that shapes gameplay – every helpful bystander, every hobo, every mime, every boss – is male.
Where are the evil women? Where are the other female helpful NPCs? Come on! We’re not all rake-wielding seekers of vengeance or self-assured scientific genii, you know!
The game is also unabashedly classist. You probably guessed that from the hobos.
But aside from this, the story is excellent, the dialogue is superb and often horribly funny, and the gameplay is challenging, but easy enough that even a gamer as timing-deficient as myself managed to complete it in the recommended 6-8 hours. If you like Penny Arcade, get the game. If you think you’d like Penny Arcade if you understood what the characters were talking about, get this game – all the context is provided. Seriously, you guys. I haven’t even mentioned the bit with the Silent Pope.
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