IIt’s a classic British comedy setup: an unknown young salesman from a major company is sent on a seemingly mundane trip to an eccentric town, and chaos ensues. This excellent game from small studio Coal Supper makes it clear from the start that it intends to stuff this setting with as much slapstick and surrealism as possible. Leaving the opening sequence set in a 10-storey office, the player is forced to climb out of a window, his fall prevented by the bus he must board for the rest of the journey.
When you arrive in the fictional northern English town of Barnsworth, a sort of gloomy reincarnation of early 1980s Barnsley, you’re supposed to meet the Mayor, but he’s busy, so you go out into the city. Here you encounter a bevy of odd characters, drawn in eerily bright colors and a deceptively childlike style. They usually greet you with a “nice to see you” and gather you together to deal with an absurd crisis. This might be a fat gentleman with his arm stuck in a drain, a fries shop owner whose fryer has broken, or an aging admiral who asks you to gather up some seagulls. But wherever you go, through the market, across the rooftops, down the lanes, you’ll encounter eccentrics doing odd jobs. The strange logic and spiraling…
As for comedic influences, the creators name-drop Reeves and Mortimer and The Mighty Boosh, but the interplay of slapstick, surrealism, and pop art also brings to mind Monty Python, Yellow Submarine, and the slightly subversive 1980s comics Whoopi and Wither and Chips. But don’t worry, you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the game’s sheer exuberance and dark charm.
What might help is a little knowledge of northern working-class stereotypes: the number of shops with rhyming names (Doug’s Rugs, Nick’s Bricks and, my favorite, Raj’s Chargers, a mobile phone market stall), the unhealthy food offerings (fast food trucks selling Porky Nobbers, carts selling “Oily Bops”) and the almost psychotic competition between pie bakers.
But overlook these and plenty of other jokes emerge as you find keys and hammers, get a shy boy to beg for milk, or just enjoy the contributions of Matt Berry’s voice actor, who brings these eccentrics to life alongside the rest of the talented cast. In between the main quests, which build on top of each other like dominoes like the puzzles in Codemasters’ old Dizzy games, there are downright bizarre sequences that have you exploring the surface of a steak or collecting bubbles on a spirit level.
There’s also some light satire towards the games industry: graffiti on a wall depicts a man urinating on the word “Ludnarrative,” and in a filthy sewer area between the two locations is a sign that reads “Liminal spaces may not be as appealing as they seem.” Indeed, the game as a whole, with its relentless string of fetching tasks, could be interpreted as pasting the tedious conventions of open-world side quests.
The game’s three-hour runtime is packed with so many ideas, visual gags, wordplay, plants and rewards that you’ll need to play a few more times to take it all in. It’s great fun to play such a completely uncompromisingly silly game, but like a lot of the most ridiculous British humor, there’s also a quiet undertone of angst and despair in this one. The pie seller, the town drunk, the milk-scared child – they’re all trapped in their own quiet personal hells that just happen to be funny to the rest of us.
In the future, when the topic of the funniest comedy games of all time comes up, the usual names will likely pop up: Monkey Island, The Stanley Parable, Death Stranding (just kidding), etc. But now a new game will join them: Coal Supper has created perhaps the 21st century’s first fantastic abstract cartoon puzzle game set in Yorkshire. Thank goodness.
Source: www.theguardian.com
