A few weeks ago, while I was sick, I was looking for something to distract me from my impending demise and burial. As a man, and as is typical, this did not come to pass; so instead you're stuck here reading the thoughts I furiously input into my keyboard.
The thing that I found to distract me from my upcoming mortality was an old video game. An old copy of an old video game, at that, with South Park Stick of Truth having sat on my shelf alongside my entertainment unit for the ... XBOX 360. I put it into my Xbox Series X, and I sat back, awaiting an epic adventure.
I was not very disappointed. In fact, I wasn't disappointed at all. Only, perhaps in myself and my ailing body drawing my further and further away from the grave with each side quest that I completed and every new friend that I made.
In South Park Stick of Truth, you're the new kid in town, and the developers masterfully borrow from the likes of Valve's Half-Life, ensuring that this voiceless, yet, befaced avatar does not utter a single line of dialogue for the whole game.
Your goal is to play with the kids, and as a kid, you end up finding yourself in a game of literal live action roleplaying between two factions of kids. It's gang warfare, abstracted to South Park's typical crude, unsophisticated humour, in a RPG, but, it is genuinely hilarious.
You have a few classes to choose from. There's the typical fare: fighter, wizard, thief, and then... there's the class of Jew. Just Jew. It is an amusing parody on stereotypes, and takes on some further almost biblical meanings (if you want to interpret it that way) - especially so if you decide to have some cosmetic surgery (and apparently, change your character's appearance to Hasselholf ) - as one of the Jew's skills is the "Sling of David".
Layered humor is what South Park Stick of Truth does really quite well.
But how is it as an RPG?
Combat is turn based, and you must select an ability, then an enemy to use it on. While this is resolving, you must then press a button (or a sequence of buttons) with specific timing. While under normal circumstances I am certain that this is a simple and easy exercise, it is one that I found great difficulty in between coughs, sneezes, and generally looking forward to the sweet embrace of death.
You see, in case you don't remember, I was heinously ill with a simple virus the entire time I was playing this game.
Story and pacing is good, and the world is pretty much what you'd expect from a game based on a popular TV show. The visuals look like an episode of what I remember the TV show to look like, and audio was passable.
There were so many fart sounds and fart jokes, and even side quest distractions linked to literal talking poo, just like the TV show.
What the game isn't is profound or incredibly meaningful. You gain perks as you make more friends in the world, which is completed as you endure through side quests. While most of these are intelligently not "kill x goblins", or "bring x item", there's no quest that feels like it is one to remember for the ages.
There is good variety in the environments, and the story does stick together. The game was about the right length for me tolerate - and saw me through about 18 hours or so. There were no cliffhangers or things that at any point ... made me want to stay up past my bed time or sacrifice other responsibilities in order to keep playing.
So, given everything South Park is known for, this is a respectable, responsible effort of a game from competent developers.
I have the other South Park RPG sitting in the shelf (The Fractured Butt Hole) - and maybe I will get to it at some point. For now, I feel like I want to continue pursuing my unending list of Steam games in my unending efforts to play through my steam library alphabetically, and actually write about each game.
Oh, and one final thing - because I live in Australia, there's several bits that were completely censored from this game. The developers get around this by placing textual descriptions of the censored scenes like so:
I found this quite possibly more amusing than witnessing the described scene. All this with the highest "Rating" of R18+ that is allowable in Australia.