‘On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness’ nails the sweet spot of episodic content delivery and captures the spirit of its sources.

By the time they’d decided to put out a game of their own, the proprietors of Penny Arcade already felt like old friends to me. Between their regular posts, comics, and occasional podcasts — all of which are refreshingly frank and funny, a mix of comedy and criticism — their sense of humor, as well as their sense of what makes a good game, were well apparent. I’ve agreed with them more often than not, like a slightly nerdier pal who knows his shit and good-naturedly advises you on games while cracking jokes that reference role-playing.

Maybe because of that sense of relationship to the creators, I was willing to forgive the game’s few faults. While playing the latest installment on Live Arcade, some isolated bugs did get in the way of pure enjoyment, so I feel obligated to politely get them out of the way. For example, a brain-shaped puzzle section midway through the game froze as I was almost finished, forcing me to start again. During the two-part final boss fight, I easily passed the first phase and couldn’t quite figure out the trick to phase two on my initial attempt. After failing, the fight wouldn’t re-initiate, leaving me stuck standing and staring at his menacing gyrations. Again, I had to reload. Design-wise I was only really frustrated once. I had to traverse the world several times looking for a bouquet’s worth of flowers to please an insufferable old woman who stood between me and the rest of a level, because the ones I brought her the first time were the wrong color. Choosy wench.

But I’m much more willing to overlook these minor inconveniences a) because the rest of the game is so enjoyable, and b) because I know the team behind it cares enough to listen to complaints like these and try to make improvements. And since it’s episodic, they’ll put them into practice by the next release. In fact, the second episode is already an improvement over the first. The battles are more intricate and the levels are more varied. They made this installment longer, and added more of the entertaining animated sequences — of which I particularly enjoyed the robotic mayhem, and Tycho’s facial expression leading into the final battle. I even thought the jokes were better. There’s a bit about the use of a file in a jail break that’s particularly great comedy. This is one of the only games in my collection other than Psychonauts and a few segments of GTA’s talk radio that made me laugh consistently, so it’s in good company. Since more often in games the laughs come at the expense of the dialog, intentionally funny lines deserve honest praise.

……….

The most appealing things about this game, though, have less to do with the finer details of the content itself than with the form it takes as a whole. For starters, this has to be the best licensed game I’ve ever played — admittedly a short list, since most licensed games are so universally panned they don’t even get the benefit of a trial. Flying in the face of cheap cash-ins, Penny Arcade Adventures effectively retains the personality of the source material, but doesn’t try to recreate an existing experience in game form. Instead, they built a game around the property that allows them to highlight their strengths, making a light-hearted RPG with unique visuals, quirky characters, clever storytelling, and genuinely funny writing. Sure, that’s thanks mostly to their perfect storm of circumstances, having heavy involvement in the process as well as a deep understanding of games, but they still deserve credit for making it work.

Still, the single most attractive thing about playing On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, to me, is how they’ve nailed the sweet spot of episodic content delivery. The timing is great; they don’t pass the window of even qualifying as episodic like Half-Life, nor do they break up a single game into chunks just to parcel it out over time. Each of the two installments have felt like concise, self-contained stories that can be played over a week at an hour a night, or over a weekend if you dedicate a couple of full afternoons. It’s a combination of high involvement and low investment that perfectly suits an adult gamer’s schedule. High involvement in that it’s by no means ‘casual’ — in the sense most people mean when referring to simple, free, Flash puzzle games — with a full suite of character leveling, strategic combat, actual puzzle-solving, collectibles, and a solid narrative. But low investment in that you know it’s only a handful of hours’ time, doesn’t involve endlessly complicated decision-making, and you can actually finish it in a weekend without becoming dead to the world.

Contrast their delivery method with a game like Fallout 3, which I’ve also been playing and took a break from to download Penny Arcade. In the former, there are dozens of what could be called ‘episodes’, with each side mission telling its own self-contained story, all taking place in the same world. But since each of those could be happening concurrently, the amount of options at any time gets overwhelming and almost paralyzing. I look at the Fallout map and see so much blank space left to explore, there’s literally no end in sight. With episodic delivery, I know that I’m committed for a digestible chunk of time, and that by the end of that span I’ll have been told a story and felt like I’ve accomplished something. With the more difficult and expansive open-world game, I could spend a whole weekend playing, getting killed fairly regularly because I’m not leveled up enough, and only progress from 20% to 24% complete while wondering what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

I’m not saying Fallout isn’t satisfying in other ways. Sometimes I do want a sprawling epic, and there’s room in my library for both. It’s just a shame that so few are providing that low-investment experience without also being low-involvement (I’m looking at you, twin-stick shooters and falling-jewel-puzzle clones). The funny (or troubling) thing is, the amount of play time built into this $15 game isn’t that much less than some full-priced games, clocking in around 6 hours or so at my guess. It’s certainly a good value for the price. But it feels like less of a commitment, with the added benefits that only come from episodic delivery. For example, they can use cliffhangers, a device under-utilized in games, which full-sized titles get skewered for since resolution could take over a year. And instead of buying a giant RPG, playing half-way through and moving on because it’s grown tiresome, each chapter is a fresh start and a chance to get re-charmed by the game all over again. Really, I’m shocked there aren’t heaps of people doing this instead of a select few.

If it has to be one — on Xbox anyway, since Mac-using non-Wii owners are missing out on Sam & Max or Strongbad games — I’m glad it’s the team at Penny Arcade, and that they’ve put so much thought into doing it right. Dropping into their strange and supernatural steampunk world every few months has been a welcome change of pace from the serious and strenuous larger-scale games, and I love the fact that I won’t have to wait much longer to do it again.