Every once in a while someone out there comes up with an ingenious idea. Maybe not quite as revolutionary as cheese on toast, still one worthy of recognition. When they do come out with a new concept and show it to us, the adoring bright eyed bushy tailed public, normally we pick our noses, discover why fluff we have building up in our belly buttons and move back to playing the old games that have loved and kept us safe from the evil monsters all these years.

So when the heavily long-winded titled Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1: how many more bits can they add to the title, was brought to my attention some days ago, rather than fear the concept outright and demand that the police lock it up because it touched me a in bad place, I decided as an experiment to see what the fuss was about by buying the full game as opposed to relying on the demo.

Put simply, PAAOTRSPODE1 (I’m not typing the whole title out anymore) is a combination adventure / RPG with Final Fantasy 7 style combating and comic bits in-between sections of the game.

Now being a lazy man by nature, I would be tempted to say if that doesn’t sound appealing right there, then just walk away right now.

Go on.

I’m waiting….

Ah, you’re still there, so I guess I have to explain a little more. Bugger. I thought this would be easy.
This game is the brain child of Penny Arcade creators and their art design and writing clearly is in play here, as watching the opening cut-scenes is joy to behold. Penny Arcade animation at long last, for quite a while the cartoons have been crying out for some motion to take it forward, so for those of you who are fans of Penny Arcade’s work don’t worry. It’s all there.

However, this being a cosmopolitan world, I must assume there are people who have never heard of Penny Arcade and will be wondering why bother. Well, in PAAOTRSPODE1, you play an unassuming young person of your choice complete with comedy top hat if you so wish, a resident in the 1920’s era where all is well except for leaves on a lawn.

Well if it were indeed my lawn there would also be car parts, bits of dead badger and a scarecrow dressed like Britney Spears to scare people away but never mind, we must move on.

All is well sweeping up the place, until low and behold; a giant robot destroys your house.

Two wandering chaps in striking outfits wander past after it, and you start on your glorious adventure through the game’s perverted landscape. Along the way you fight enemies such as the juice fudgers (can’t really chance swearing here) who seem to delight in having their wicked way with fruit and your legs, mime artists (the most evil of all artists) and of course, those lovable (but highly smelly, down on their luck and therefore why not kill them) hobos who during combat seem to be in remarkable good health despite the fate that has befallen them.

So even if you’ve never heard of Penny Arcade, come on! You can fight mimes! Who doesn’t want to slap them around? (Note: No actual mimes have been slapped around for the purpose of this review)

You fight with these different enemies, who all have different strengths and weaknesses to the different characters you have at your fighting disposal to kill them with, in three different locations, with a forth location being the place where you visit a little girl who is handy with practically everything. If she can turbo-charge a rake as a better weapon, who are we to argue?

Each location has a different theme to them and all are animated very well, and the NPCs all come into their own with their look and styles. The NPCs are the guys you get “cases” from and from then onwards you trundle around each level trying to find various bits until you’re finished and then you go back and claim whatever prize you were after.

The sound work is excellent through, the music was quite old school with a hint of lunacy, just what the doctor ordered, though I did wish on many occasions that there was more voice work put into for the conversations, it personally would have made a difference for the overall experience.

Now this is where it gets difficult to write further glowing praise about the game and it’s about as painful as hearing Elton John sing about David Furniture. Basically because each quest you partake during the course of the 7 hour game normally means that you get into a fight, and that for me is when the game falls flat on its arse.

Yes, you read that right.

The game’s combat system is a Marmite affair, you will either love it or hate it.

At first the game eases you in, leaving you thinking, oh is that all there is too it? But later on, it turns sour.

Frankly it’s not that hard to loathe it when the whole blocking and counter-attack system seems to be as flaky as someone suffering from leprosy. Hit and miss doesn’t even come close to describing it as the point where you would block a juicer’s sexual advance seems to change with every single attack and in the later battles this becomes the difference between victory and defeat.

The boss battles for instance are close to exhausting for the sheer length of time they take up, and that can be just for your first attempt, where you are throwing everything at them except for the kitchen sink and hell, I ended up wishing that was an option at one point just to make the madness end.

The bosses all have very high hit points against with attacks which make you about as effective in battle as a handful of shower gel. So try and block their attacks to try and sort yourself out, and oh dear, you failed again. To add insult to blood loss, it gets worse with each boss battle, so it will take a few times to succeed on the PC, where instead it appears people seem to have no issue on the XBOX 360 version.

To be slightly fair they have broken it up with three special characters who have attacks to further decrease the enemy for you, but during the boss battles, they are next to useless which is a grand shame as it’s rather great to see a girl wielding a flame-thrower. What? Nothing wrong with that is there?

The battle system is something you can beat given time, but it is something that needs sorting out for Episode 2, because if it came down to having to having to use that system just to even get a glimpse of the good story direction, the insane banter and good production values, then that will put people off I’m afraid. And that will include fans of Penny Arcade, the last group which should be put off from this product.

So there you have it.

If you are after a good funny at times story, with excellent design and sound with some creative enemies, this is something you should have a look at. However, if you hated FF7 and the though of having to go through that fight system leaves you needing injections to make the pain go away, then it must said, you should look elsewhere, which is a great shame.

So to sum up:

• Combat will make you think Satan is a nice guy. Perhaps misunderstood too…
• Story actually was rather fun.
• The jokes when they present, are great, keep em coming!
• The animated cut scenes are very well done.
• Music was excellent and suited the period they were aiming for.
• Combat will make you want to eat your own internal organs.

Now using the high-tech scoring system constructed by the same scientists who invented the toilet and the Battenberg cake, we shall open up the engines and demand the gods rain down a score of fire onto us:

So much promise, yet just that one thing was enough to throw a lot of goofy and very creative, well put together work out the window. DAMN YOU FIGHT SYSTEM FROM HELL!