The Book of Revenant

I’ve been a huge fan of Penny Arcade and have been for years. Their humor just works for me. It’s frightening almost to think about how long it’s been since I started reading this comic. I mean, I was in highschool. Early highschool.

They’ve been making fun of and praising games and the industry behind them. But this past Wednesday saw the release of their own game. So being the loyal fan I am, I bought it.

Well, that was an ordeal itself. Microsoft won’t take my credit cards anymore so I couldn’t buy it on Xbox Live. Since the Penny Arcade dudes are now Mac whores, they made sure their game could be played on my computer of choice. Score one more point for the guys.

Except the poor servers for the game were being hammered not unlike a horny Catholic school girl on prom night. I wasn’t able to successfully download the game until the next morning. I actually emailed customer support to notify them of my problem. A nice person named Terry let me know that they’d look into whatever they could, but as it was their first release they were kinda going nutty. Okay, I made up the last half of that, sorry Terry. But I think that’s what you were probably doing.

So anyway, to the game. It’s an RPG. Score another point. They sure know what I like. It’s interesting in that like Final Fantasy’s ATB system, you have a bar that fills up. But what adds for some interesting strategy is that what you can do comes in steps. First items, then basic attacks and finally special attacks. So you end up using a lot of items in this game.

There not being any “magic” in the game, items actually take that role pretty heavily. Not only do they heal, but do damage and can raise or lower stats. Tycho is slow as hell and Gabe is relatively weak so giving them the appropriate boosts helps loads. But the enemies are apt to boost themselves as well, or try to knock your stats down a peg or two.

This is where the good idea of having only one stat boost/detriment allowed at one time comes in. Often you’ll be lowering one of the stats of an enemy just to get rid of the bonus to strength they gave themselves. Or boosting your own to get rid of the one given to you. Hell, some of the fights were a constant struggle to keep an even footing with the enemies.

Besides your three main characters you get a couple of summons who mostly do a good amount of damage. Except for that damn cat, Thomas Kemper, who mostly does 1 damage to every enemy but in rare, rare, very fucking rare cases does 999. That’s totally awesome. But even using the seemingly worthless cat has a thinly veiled use.

See, the game works by the aforementioned bars filling up. Well, while you’re doing attacks, being attacked or having the cat lick himself to deal one point of damage the bars still fill. So having the cat take up some time can help balance things out for you by giving you precious seconds to fill up your bars and make decisions.

So all that above mentioned stuff makes for an enjoyable game in the game-play sense. Everything else? Well, it looks good, it has decent music and it has a hilarious story with great writing. Hell, you’ll be inspecting everything you can just to see the hilarious descriptions.

The $20 price-tag may seem steep for episodic content, but it was easily some of the best gaming I’ve done in a while. I eagerly anticipate episode two.