Not just an excessively long title, OTRSPOD is a short yet content filled role playing adventure and the first of four.
If you've neglected the works of Penny Arcade I'll try to get you up-to-date. Penny Arcade is easily the most popular gaming comic on the web, and for good reason. The creators Jerry and Mike (not actually named as per their comic persona) do a great job at incorporating offensive yet poignant humor against some big and some minuscule gaming issues. Universally considered some of the internet's greatest gaming critics, it's interesting to see them push out a game of their own intellectual property and creative input so a respectable level of quality is expected from those who continually pan the works of others.
OTRSPOD has no hesitation in establishing a strong steam punk setting opening in the fictitious locale of New Arcadia, 1922. After taking a moment to create a character from a small but variable set of face and clothing features a short intro does a great job of incorporating the player's character into some impressive 2D footage of an undesirable turn of events eventually leading to meeting some obvious partners, Gabe and Tycho.
The first installment of Penny Arcade Adventures melds elements of different genres here and there to create a mutant adventure / role playing game that works quite well in practice. Outside of battle players must navigate and interact with a large assortment of environment pieces and NPC's to solve puzzles and progress through the story as per most adventure games. In fact the puzzle solving side of OTRSPOD is a tad lacking as all interaction is played out entirely through left clicks. There's no, "Pick Up" or "Use", it's just left-click, left-click resulting in a severe lack of challenge on the progressive side of things. In fact it's not really puzzle solving, playing through OTRSPOD outside of combat is nothing but left-clicks until progress is found.
A lack of puzzles or general thinking is soon countered, as OTRSPOD is crammed full of dialogue and humor that most the enjoyment is gained by sitting back and chatting to all of the wild characters such as the "Urinologist", who actively studies urine by marking his territory as far as possible. Actually the game has a strange consistency with sophistication in narrative that's often followed by low-brow offensive humor against more colloquial writing. Kind of like my reviews.
While OTRSPOD has enough of that classic Penny Arcade humor to flesh out the adventure and make it worthy on it's own, brushing up on some of the online comics wouldn't hurt if you were new to the content, as Penny Arcade most certainly give their humor a more 'adult' twist. Considering the first event to occur in the game is the attack of a giant 'fruit bleeping' robot I hope this is exemplified as something you wouldn't want kids playing, despite it's obvious cartoon appeal.
Set across 4 different locales, OTRSPOD involves a lot of click click clicking around the place to unlock progress, so in-between this hunting and chatting around New Arcadia a good amount of combat is needing to take place too. Combat is played on a turn-based RPG style with some arcade elements to spice things up against the more classic RPG battle systems. You'll have your three team mates, Gabe, Tycho and your own persona battling against a variety of hobo's, fruit bleeping mimes and more.
Combat is a mix of old-school turned-based ATB combat against more arcade button mashing game styles. Each character can do the same 3 moves, use inventory, attack, or unleash an overtime attack but not before the latter becomes available. Each command timer needs to fill up one after the other, so you'll be able to issue Gabe an inventory command, but that will reset his timer and he won't be able to attack until his inventory command becomes available again, then his attack bar will begin to fill up. This involves a lot of patience, as waiting a full three cycles for an overtime attack can take some time while the attack command is sitting there blinking ready to use. One down side to this combat system exists and I'm not quite sure if it's intentional or a game flaw. For your attack command to charge up, your inventory command must be ready. If you click it just to browse your items and see what you can use, your attack command will cease charging up. So while everyone is just standing there doing nothing and you're browsing inventory, whoever you're looking at is going to be losing some battle progress while the other two party members progress normally.
As Inventory is always the first command to become available, it's fitting that there's a very large amount of in-battle items to pick up throughout the game. Gabe tends to recharge his abilities quicker than the others, but only has fists as a weapon often resulting in little damage. This means it's best to have Gabe continually using items throughout battle while the other two characters let their overtime or regular attacks charge up. The overtime attacks can be paired up too, if another or all of your party members also have the overtime ability ready it can be used together for extra damage.
The overtime attacks are what really spice up battle a bit as they are usually played out with the space bar to maximize damage. Either spamming space bar or pressing it at appropriate times results in a better attack, so in-between waiting and thinking out your attacks sudden bursts of space-bar mashing adds some interactivity and excitement to what otherwise would be a too laid back affair.
There's a large number and a lot of versatility in items, from defense raising and attack lowering to stuff like oranges to distract Fruit Bleepers while you let your moves charge up. Eventually you'll find characters work better per enemy, so again you'll have to think out who uses which items, on who, and when.
There's no spells or skill trees to branch out on, and little leveling takes place. This is obviously due to the episodic nature of the releases. I assume you'll be able to be able to play Episode 2 without having owned Episode 1, so unless Episode 2 instantly boosts default characters I don't know how transferring or continuing on your custom built character is possible from this first episode.
This is where OTRSPOD is lacking a bit. Any sense of character evolution or expansion is lost in the length of the episode. OTRSPOD is priced respectively, ultimately forming a valuable package as it's a cheap quick download for a short but content filled game. The combat is fun, the story is fun, but you know eventually it ends a bit short once you really get familiar with combat. There's a few mini-games thrown in at Pelican Bay to unlock 'tokens' for progress, but these are very underdeveloped hardly shaping up to most the content found on that crap-barrel Newgrounds.
The involvement of the Penny Arcade crew is quite obvious, and while Hothead Games have done a great job at creating a worthy game there's a few things in OTRSPOD of extreme convenience that are really noticeable and are obviously designed by true gamers. Such as the save system, the game saves every five seconds. Talk to a mime, and get no response? Game saved. Another feature is being able to instantly zap from screen to screen by clicking the border, as opposed to having to walk across the screen as per most adventure titles.
All up, this first episode of the Penny Arcade Adventures is certainly a worthy purchase considering it's price mark. Sure it's short, but it has a lot of content that doesn't need much of your time or patience to access. The puzzles are simple bordering non-existent but all the characters and humor are there with enjoyable gameplay to make a package entertaining for anyone Penny Arcade fan or not.
Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rainslick Precipice Of Darkness Episode One
83%
The Good -
* Lots of humor and characters.
* Enjoyable and unique combat system adds new life to RPG's.
* Cheap and easily downloaded.
The Bad -
* Questionable role playing progression against episodic releases.
* Little challenge and interactivity outside of combat.
* Oddly complex narrative against some very crass humor.