South Park: The Stick of Truth

I didn’t get the South Park game when it came out, even though I heard a lot of positive things and have been enjoying the show since it first started airing in the US – with a few hiccups here and there as the show went off the rails for a while. The Stick of Truth didn’t appeal for two reasons – firstly, I had a huge backlog of games I wanted to play at that time. But secondly, and more importantly, I refused to spend money on an incomplete game, and in the UK several sequences were cut out because someone somewhere deemed them inappropriate. Total bullshit, especially because one late-game sequence disarming a bomb recalls one of the cut sequences and thus makes very little sense.

But I’ve been a lot more into South Park since the new season began and The Fractured But Whole seems a lot of fun. Plus if I preorder, I get The Stick of Truth for free. So that’s what I did, and knowing that it was a very short game, played it through. The censorship, repetitive combat and simple story mean I’m happy to play it through just once and forget it (I sided with Kyle and the elves, for the record), but I actually rather enjoyed the 8 or 9 hours I gave this game. Ordinarily I don’t feel like I’ve really finished a game and can write my review until I’ve seen everything it has to offer and usually gotten the platinum, but in this case just a single run was adequate. Which isn’t to say it was a cursory speed-run: I finished all the side-quests but one (didn’t find the last hobo) and did pretty well on the collection and completion sidequests too. But I don’t think I’ll be going back for more.

The game was fun. Visually, it is of course just like an episode of the TV show. That isn’t the greatest of feats, given the show’s famously simplistic style. The acting is of course delivered by the show’s main cast, and probably the main draw, with the same crude humour, occasionally clever satirical parts and lots of nods to the show’s past – even right back to the beginning at times, with callbacks to very old episodes through elements like the stuffed and mounted Scuzzlebutt. And the gameplay is a satisfying rendition of classic turn-based RPGs, with combat revolving mostly around status ailments. Honestly, the game was far, far too easy. There was only one fight that I found challenging, which was against Al Gore and his bodyguards, which I had to concentrate for because if I didn’t defend against the enemy’s attacks with perfect timing I lost. But that was the one and only time that the game presented anything even a little difficult, and once Kyle joins the party his most powerful attack just wiped everyone out like the Magus Sisters in Final Fantasy X.

So with the presentation as would be expected from modern games, and the gameplay not so great, what about the story? Well, that’s certainly the saving grace of the game and what keeps the player coming back, though it’s not exactly the best story ever. The charm is that the boys are playing at being fantasy characters, from the Black Friday episodes of the show. They have split into two factions, the humans – led by Cartman – and the elves – led by Kyle.

The player, as a new kid, meets Butters and through him joins Cartman’s faction. He learns to fight, and in a parody of Skyrim that goes way too far and dominates too much of the game despite not being funny, he uses magical farts to get an advantage in battle. Thus he goes around town beating up bullies, rats and homeless people and making friends on Facebook. After causing disaster on an alien spaceship that abducts him for a bit of anal probing – censored in Europe – our hero ends up having to contend with an alien virus that has disastrous and very South Park-ish effects on the town’s population, as well as the secret government agents who want to hush the whole thing up.

The parodies of classic games are certainly enjoyable. While the turn-based combat evokes Final Fantasy, the mute main character is more like Link and there’s a whole section that’s essentially a tribute to Zelda. The show’s climax with betrayals and revelations and big firey battles with recognisable old faces is satisfying, too.

South Park may be puerile and at times push a joke too far when it’s not actually that entertaining, but generally it’s the added layers that a joke gets that are amusing. Gross-out humour about Mr. Slave’s butt isn’t very funny, but seeing an old face long missing from the show in an unexpected place gets a laugh. The edgy humour of fighting through an abortion clinic isn’t so amusing, but getting cornered into having to pretend to do an abortion on Randy Marsh by your cover story makes it much funnier (though again gets censored). The game also did the fashionable thing of playing with the notion of free will, like Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line, but for a funny sequence with a very creepy photographer.

Initially satisfying to explore with lots of combat to learn, it’s a shame there isn’t a mode that’s much more challenging, and that there couldn’t be considerably more variety in the battles – and a lot less farting. We’ll see how game 2 measures up tomorrow!