Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1

Review by Steerpike
June 2008

Offended by Vulgarity? Stop Now

I know it’s in vogue to dislike Penny Arcade these days, but I just can’t toe that particular line. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins—better known as their comic alter-egos Gabe and Tycho—have managed to coax plenty of laughs from me over the years. Penny Arcade is, to me, something that this industry needs: something as seriously important as it is absurdly amusing; video gaming’s satirical conscience. It is to games what Doonesbury is to politics. It proves something about games as a whole. Having a figurehead industry comic makes the medium more ... real, somehow. More focal, more imperative and undismissable.

And though it began as a humble webcomic, Penny Arcade has grown into a media empire. In 2007 alone, its Child’s Play charity drive raised over a million dollars in money and toys donated to children’s hospitals around the world, making those dreary places a little brighter, a little more hopeful. The annual Penny Arcade Expo—PAX to the cool kids—rivals the mighty E3 in attendance. And through it all, through all of the charity and event management, despite their many hundreds of thousands of dollars in branded marketing, contract work, and guest appearances, Holkins and Krahulik have churned out a new full color strip, like clockwork, every other weekday.

And every other weekday, the world of gaming includes that strip in its morning routine, alongside coffee and toothbrushing. People in the business listen to what Penny Arcade says. The comic’s legendary ability to ridicule has made it famous and, at times, feared. If there were Commandments in this industry, one of them would surely be Thou Shalt Not Get on Penny Arcade’s Bad Side, for Lo, They Shall Destroy Thee. Penny Arcade wields true power in the industry, though I’ve never gotten the sense that the company’s employees are drunk upon it. They’re still just shlubs who love games, who know the secret hearts of gamers, and who happen to be able to make a living telling jokes about them.

And they typically use their power for good. These guys know the games industry; heck, they influence it. Decisions and reversals alike have occurred due to Penny Arcade’s mockery. Still, when the company announced its intention to get into the game development business itself, there were some eyebrows raised. Not only was it a risky endeavor for a duo who’ve made their share of enemies amongst the enthusiast press, but for two guys who love playing games so much, suddenly making them seemed almost like changing sides.

But make one they have; On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is a planned four-episode series developed by Hothead Games, with original art from Krahulik and a script penned by Holkins. It is a straight-up turn-based adventure, not too dissimilar from an action-oriented JRPG, but with a distinct style and voice, plus a couple of very clever original ideas, all its own.

Still, both sides of the quality coin show their face here. Precipice is fun but also painfully linear, far too short, and lacking in any replay value. The real selling point is that it’s a Penny Arcade cartoon made interactive, from the trademark artistic style and four-letter humor straight through to the inside jokes. If you’re a fan, you’ll like Precipice for the same reason you like the comic. If you’re not a fan, steer clear; because only fans can overlook the game’s single, suffocating issue: it’s fun, but it ain’t $20 of fun. It’s about $13 of fun. For $12.95, this game would be a Gold Star, because at that price you overlook or forgive much that you wouldn’t in a premium-priced title. At twenty clams, the Get out of Jail Free card isn’t quite as potent.

Steerpike Uses the F Word

The year is 1922, and the pattering of raindrops from a late-autumn storm are the harbingers of doom in the burg of New Arcadia, a scum-rotten dive of a city infested with all manner of evil. Yeah, it’s the kind of place even the hooligans avoid, where the air is black with the fetid breath of forgotten gods and every doorway cries of despair. New Arcadia ain’t for the timid, that’s for sure—and powers are stirring that have long slumbered beneath its foundations. That’s where the Startling Developments Detective Agency earns its bread and butter: founders John Gabriel and Tycho Brahe fight toe-to-toe with evil so wretched it’d curl the devil’s toenails. These are your go-to guys for supernatural investigation and elimination. Gabe’s flying fists of fury can bloody the nose of whatever Lovecraftian dreckbeast your unholy spells can conjure up; Tycho’s as mean with a tommy gun as he is with a textbook.

And they’re gonna need everything in the arsenal, because today something big—something really big, we’re talking something that makes the Stay Puft Marshmallow man feel inferior—has turned its lambent red eyes and stainless steel juicing apparatus toward the huddling city. Penny Arcade fans know the vicious machine monster to which I refer. Everyone else: I refer to ... ah ... ahem. Oh, screw it: I speak of the Fruit Fucker™ Brand Home Juicing System, a minor if recurring character in the comic, and one of the key villains in Precipice.

Actually, one of the greatest things about this game is the fact that it allows Penny Arcade fans to place themselves inside the duo’s big adventure, with all of the little secondary characters and fan-service asides. Those who read the comic know its little world very well: Gabe and Tycho’s apartment is full of home appliances with consciousness and personality; and their neighbors, relations, and enemies play no small role in this game. It’s fun to go through the character creation system, which (despite sharply limited options, especially for female characters) allows you to create a reasonable facsimile of yourself in Krahulik-ified cartoon form. You’re an average sort, living an average life, out peacefully raking leaves one average afternoon ... when your house gets crushed under the galvanized metal foot of Fruit Fucker Prime, the Juicer to Rule Them All, as it strolls through New Arcadia, carving a swath of destruction—and leaving behind hundreds of tiny, deadly juicing minions—in its wake.

Tycho and Gabe are already hot on the beast’s stainless heels, and thus is your lot thrown in with theirs. All of this happens within the first ten minutes of play, which serve also as a convenient tutorial. But chthonic juicing mechanisms are just the beginning—evil mimes, the homeless, and Tycho’s niece also figure prominently. So does urine.

Interestingly, little actual plot is revealed in this, the first of Precipice’s four episodes. Basically, the mimes are trying to resurrect an ancient Mime God, as mimes are wont to do; and the juicers are running amok through the city, but beyond that there’s not too much really meaty here, story-wise. It has all of the trademark goofiness and scatological largesse of a Penny Arcade cartoon, and there’s just something about finding yourself living one that makes it really delightful.

Yardwork Leads to Mayhem Every Time

Adventure fans such as those who compose a large portion of the FFC readership will find themselves right at home in Precipice’s left-mouse-button-and-spacebar world. The game, which is also available over Xbox Live, is pretty simple, focusing largely on exploration, box smashing, and turn-based combat.

That latter is spiced up by the inclusion of some mechanics that add to the depth of strategy in combat, should you choose to take advantage of them. The entire system is basically a rock-paper-scissors stats setup in which your trio’s speed, attack, and defense attributes are compared against those of the various enemies you encounter. When one of your characters is attacked, however, you have a split-second opportunity to mash the spacebar and perform a block, reducing damage or—in some cases—allowing for a devastating counterattack. It’s a very simple mechanism that nonetheless puts you in a position where you have to pay attention throughout every encounter, because the difficulty ratchets up in the middle and stays that way until you max out your characters about an hour before the game wraps up. Indeed, timing is everything in all walks of Precipice’s combat system; not only must you time your blocks, but all actions are managed through an ever-ticking pool of action points allotted to each character. Different actions take different amounts of points, calculated in real time, so there is a good deal of strategy in determining when to hold back from attacking to score special hits, deciding when it’s wise to spend time using items from your inventory, and so forth. The result is a combat system that merges turn-based with real-time in such a way as to keep you heavily engaged without becoming so reflex-intensive that slow or arthritic gamers will be put off.

Hothead was wise to invest so much development effort into the combat, because Precipice has a lot of it. The minigames tied to each of the three protagonists’ special attacks are also well-implemented, neither annoyingly simple nor frustratingly intricate. Similarly, boss encounters show a marked but not excessive increase in challenge over regular foes and are spaced nicely through the game’s approximately four-hour runtime. All in all, Precipice is a game that uses time well, from the micromanagement of your characters in combat to its overall pacing.

This is, unfortunately, also the only serious flaw. I don’t mind that it’s short; Portal was shorter and is the best game of the past five years. I do mind that it feels short, not only in a chronological sense but in terms of progress and setting. The game feels squashed, constricted, with the general air of having been dehydrated and squeezed into an uncomfortably narrow experience. There are only four major locations—of which only two contain significant play elements; only four or five different types of enemy, only five or six major characters, and very little challenge to your progression. Precipice is very much a Point A to Point B to Point C kind of game, and you’re never going to be unsure where to go or what to do next.

Is this a problem? Not exactly, and certainly not in the sense that bad combat or controls would be. Overall, it feels like Precipice wanted to be a bigger game but just ... isn’t. You reach a point when walking the same streets and smashing the same crates for the same powerups used when fighting the same enemies against the same backdrops with the same attacks to achieve the same goals becomes kind of same-y. The interesting thing is that the game ended exactly as that sensation began to grate on me, so, despite the cramped conditions, I never quite got to the point of being irritated by it.

Juicing for Fun and Profit

And that’s why it’s a perfect game for fans of Penny Arcade. The hilarious animated Flash cutscenes and droll, italic- and big-word-intensive narration show that Krahulik and Holkins, even after all these years together, still don’t miss a trick. If you find the comic funny, you will laugh out loud at Precipice’s dialogue and cutscenes, because despite its faults, there are some things about it that are just so ... so perfectly, classically Penny Arcade. And it was with that perspective that its creators approached the development of world and characters.

There is, for example, no voice acting in Precipice, aside from a narrator at the beginning. This was a very conscious and wise decision. Penny Arcade fans have got their own mental voices for Gabe and Tycho, so hiring actors to play them, no matter how good the talent was, would have been simply disorienting. Plus, since the whole point of Precipice is to make you feel like you’re playing a cartoon, the speech bubbles and block narration just fit in.

The world of New Arcadia is similarly well-conceived. This is a silly city, part Dashiell Hammett hard-boiled and part theatrical meloabsurdity. Precipice never deviates from its flight plan of being a shamelessly goofy romp—it never tries to be anything but what it is, and the result is an experience that, despite the brevity, feels extremely well–put together and polished. Krahulik’s art style has in my mind become so irretrievably associated with Penny Arcade that I really have difficulty looking at his work in any other setting. Perhaps sensing that, the developers didn’t try to challenge the boundaries of what we’d likely expect the adventure world to be. Rather than constraining the possible experience, it was the smartest thing they could have done. I expected—wanted—a constrained experience, and I got one.

Hothead Games is a pretty new player on the scene. As far as I can tell, the Vancouver-based company exists astride the fuzzy barrier between casual game developer (PopCap) and episodic game developer (TellTale). All in all, they’re kind of an interesting choice to develop Precipice, because the company doesn’t have a long list of credits and isn’t really well known. While On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness isn’t going to win any awards, its triumph is really its ability to effectively engage us in the dark silliness of the strange world Krahulik and Holkins have built over the years. For those who delightedly visit that world every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there are worse ways to spend your money. For those strapped for cash or ambivalent about the comic, though … wait for the inevitable boxed compilation. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Hothead Games
Publisher: Hothead Games
Release Date: May 2008

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System Requirements

Windows
Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Pentium III, AMDAthlon 1.0 GHz
64 MB video memory (shared or dedicated) with OpenGL support
512 MB RAM
Keyboard and mouse
Sound card
350 MB free hard drive space
One-time Internet connection required to activate

Mac
Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 with latest updates
PowerPC G4, G5, or Intel-based Mac 1.0 GHz
64 MB video memory
512 MB RAM
Keyboard and mouse
Sound card
350 MB free hard drive space
One-time Internet connection required to activate

Linux
Linux 32-bit x86
Pentium III, AMDAthlon 1.0 GHz
64 MB video memory (shared or dedicated) with OpenGL support
512 MB RAM
Keyboard and mouse
Sound card
350 MB free hard drive space
One-time Internet connection required to activate

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