Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 2 Video Game Review by The Game Reviews

"Let me hug your throat." A statement uttered early on by a friendly looking mental patient who just wants to be friends -- until he attempts to bludgeon you with his fists. Thus sums up the humor and experience that is Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 2, or PAAOtRPoD:E2 for short ... if one would consider that short. For those uninitiated, Penny Arcade Adventures is a downloadable episodic RPG-adventure series that takes titular smart-asses Gabe and Tycho from the ever-popular Penny Arcade comic and thrusts them into a universe full of deadly bums, vomiting phonographs, and ... ahem .... randy robots with an affection for fruit. Considering the comic is a skewed look at the ins and outs of video gaming, the two comic titans fit into this bizarre 1920s sci-fi universe unexpectedly well, as do a number of their strange supporting characters that fans know and love from the comic.

While Gabe and Tycho are clearly the stars of this adventure, you mainly get to play as a third character armed with a powerful and deadly rake. The game begins by letting you create the look of this character, or import your avatar from Episode 1. The advantage of importing your previous avatar is that you get to carry over all of the items and experience points that you had left over in the original episode, as well as keep his or her look. You can also modify your previous character’s appearance if you wish, which is a thankfully-included option. You directly control this character during the adventure, while Gabe and Tycho follow along behind you as support. The game’s story, characters, and conversations tie into the events of Episode 1 directly, but the game is fully playable without having played the prequel if one strangely chooses to do so. The gameplay is a mix of an adventure game and a JRPG, featuring fetch quests, conversation branches, and turn-based battles. Normally, that combination leads to a more niche title; one that is mostly enjoyed by those who love JRPGs (a group that does not include me). However, PAA puts enough of a twist on these conventions that it makes them feel not only fresh, but also fun and accessible to an entire new audience.

The battles play out like typical turn-based fare. Each character has a regular attack, a special attack, and the ability to use items, with each of these having their own meter. The item meter builds up almost instantly, followed closely by the attack meter, and then (more slowly) by the special attack meter. The player can either choose the option they have currently available, or wait for the better attacks to build up and do more damage. Each character’s meters build up independently of one another, so the player is able to constantly switch from one character to another, triggering attacks as abilities are ready for use. The player can also choose to let multiple characters build up special attacks at the same time to unleash a mega-powered combo attack that has 2 or 3 of your characters laying the smackdown on an enemy at the same time with super effective results. On top of all this, your characters can level up using experience points gained in battle, and new upgrades can be bought for your weapons to add exciting new attack abilities, making all of their attacks and defenses more powerful. You can also use the new-to-Episode 2 Overkill attacks to build up your stats by unleashing your special attack on a nearly dead foe, reducing them to scattered bloody pieces. While all of this may seem complex in writing, it is actually very simple in executio, and the game eases the player into these battles immediately with a helpful tutorial that explains all of the above simply and effectively.

When you aren’t exchanging shotgun blasts with upper-class philanthropists, the game has you exploring a number of colorful environments, 4 of which are new to Episode 2. Each location has plenty of places to explore, and doing so will reward the player with items, secret battles, and concept art. The quests you take on in these areas vary wildly, as you will hunt down flowers to impress a secretary, gather signatures for a urine-based science experiment, and try to free a whacked-out scientist from an insane asylum. The flow of each area feels vastly different from the previous ones, and each has a signature look to help it stand out from the rest. It is also helpful that each location has a special "hook" that switches up the gameplay a bit, which you will come to discover as you go through the game.

The visuals in the game, while nothing ground-breaking, capture the look of the comic very effectively. The game features fully animated cutscenes, an impressive feat considering that it places your created character seamlessly into each of these animations alongside Gabe and Tycho. The conversations that take place with the bizarre and lovable weirdos you encounter also feature beautifully drawn character art, making them feel like extensions of the Penny Arcade comic. As the player scrolls through text and selects from a simple dialog tree, they advance the plot and find out more information from the game’s fascinating cast of oddball characters. The game’s in-game graphics are good, especially for a budget downloadable title, and are identical in most respects to the graphics in Episode 1. The 3D character models and backgrounds clearly capture the art stylings of the comic, but do feel a bit repetitive in places. This is especially true of the game’s enemies, as each enemy type only has 1 or 2 character models associated with it. Couldn’t we at least get a color-swap, fellas? Another problem is with the giant comic book-like text bubbles that pop-up in-game and in-battle. While the hilarious commentary usually contained in these bubbles add some humor to the game, the fact that the bubbles take up such a large portion of the screen and sometimes block enemies/items makes me wish they were a bit more compact.