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

Where the combat flounders is in its reliance on a very fussy blocking mechanism. Enemy attacks can be blocked by tapping a trigger button (or the space bar, for PC players) when their health bar flashes. Time it perfectly and you take no damage, and can unleash a counter attack. Time it well, and you block but still take some damage. Time it badly and you'll either get an ineffectual partial block or no block at all. Except this flash only lasts for a split second and comes at a different point in every attack animation. There's really no way to play without relying almost entirely in this system to keep you alive and purely from a gameplay point of view, it's deeply frustrating.

It means you have to keep your eyes in about nine places at once. Even though there are audio cues to let you know when attack meters are charged up, you still have to keep track of whose attack is actually ready. You then have to select that character and target their attack. Navigating inventory items or special attack options becomes a hasty fumble, compounded by tiny text, unidentified icons and slippery cursor movement. That you also have to be watching out for tiny flashes on the health bars of up to four enemies while juggling all these other elements lends combat an overwhelming and cluttered feel. You'll expend more mental energy trying to locate the info you need on the fly than actually planning any sort of coherent attack strategy.

This only gets worse once you enter the third area of the game, where enemies can take off half your health in one hit and are suddenly immune to your most powerful attacks. As for the idea of allowing characters to talk over the start of battles, obscuring huge chunks of the screen with enormous speech balloons...well, the less said the better. Literally. And yet once you memorise the attack animations for each enemy, the timing needed to block them and which attacks cause almost no damage versus those that cause enormous damage, combat suddenly becomes farcically simple. Rather than a dynamic battle system, what you actually end up with is a role-playing rhythm game that rewards rote repetition and pattern recognition over actual tactics and thought.

Penny Arcade's saving grace is its humour, which is plentiful and almost always effective. It relies on the tone of the strip rather than the details, so those unfamiliar with Gabe and Tycho needn't worry about being left out in the cold. There are plenty of nods and in-jokes for fans, but if you don't know why those little robots enjoy sodomising citrus fruit it won't affect your ability to follow the story. This brand of comedy is certainly an acquired taste, walking a fine line between verbose wit and scatological swears, but it does enough to join the hallowed ranks of funny games that are actually funny, and I say this as someone who is lukewarm on the web comic. The portentous narrator is especially entertaining, coming off like a cross between Tom Baker and Ringo Starr. It's just a shame the sporadic NPC characters parrot the same handful of comments in linear rotation, and Penny Arcade's old habit of italicising apparently random words is still rather annoying.