Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a depressing game. It’s epic and majestic, but undoubtedly bleak. Luckily, it also has some hilarious moments timed with comedic perfection, which somehow never feel out of place. It’s a credit to the writers, and the performances of the voice actors. These are my favourite funny moments of Expedition 33.
The first time you meet him, Monoco has absolutely zero interest in joining you. He’s living the good life, he’s got his train station and wants nothing to do with the Paintress and your quest to kill her. But he’s also a Gestrel, and Gestrels love a bit of violence. A lot.
So Monoco belligerently refuses to help his old friend Verso for several moments, and you assume he’s never going to be convinced. But then this happens:
Verso: We’re going to old Lumiere.
Monaco: Okay, bye.
Verso: There’s gonna be a lot of fighting.
Monaco. Okay, I’m in.
And this game’s version of a blue-mage joins your party.
Shortly after he’s joined you comes this hilarious realisation about Monoco: the guy collects feet. Whenever you kill a nevron with Monoco in your party, he adds a new foot to his ever growing, presumably stinking, collection of monster feet. It’s completely bonkers, but serves a very handy purpose, as each one grants Monoco a new ability.
From then on, you’ll often hear Monoco’s crooning battle cry as a new fight begins: “Oh what lovely feet…”
Esquie was a surprise hit for me. My first impression was that he’d be this annoying flamboyant fool of a character, but he grew on me pretty quickly. When you unlock his various abilities, you get to hear him chant and sing whenever he starts to run, goes swimming or takes flight, and it’s funny every time:
“I’m the fastest swimmer!”
“Wheeeee!”
“Flying through the sky!”
He’s charming, whimsical and a welcome joy in a game that is full of so much grief and sadness.
Before you can even meet Esquie, you have to get past his bodyguard, which is one of the earliest funny moments in Act 1. You’re given the password by the Gestrel leader Golgra. This moment is funny in itself, as she tells you the password is simply “get out of the way”, with the instruction that you have to shout it as loud as you can. But then the moment comes when Gustave actually does it, and the poor guard is so offended and upset that you yelled at him, he sulkily moves aside, explaining that he doesn’t even know the real password. “I never realised humans could be so rude.”
The Gestrels give you various challenges at beaches scattered around the game map, and one little twerp gave me an annoying math problem to solve. He told me his current age, then asked the hypothetical question that if he were a human, how old would he be when he gommaged? I spent a good five minutes calculating it, by adding up from his age, at the same time as counting down from 33, straining my brain, wanting to get the answer right first time. I gave him my answer, 17. And he goes, “You’re probably right. I can’t count anyway.” I cracked up.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
It’s safe to say that Fumito Ueda’s third game was one of my most anticipated titles of the previous generation. Announced in 2009, I eagerly watched every gameplay trailer and read up every snippet of information I could. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remain two of my most beloved games, and I found the idea of another game by the same studio a mouth-watering temptation. A multitude of delays and long periods of silence from both Sony and the developers led many to believe it would never see the light of day, not to mention the troubling news that Ueda himself had left the project due to creative differences with Sony. The game lingered in development hell for several years and its fate was uncertain. Ueda and his team remained with the project as consultants and the game eventually had a release date set for December 2016. My excitement rekindled and I wondered how it could ever live upto 7 years of anticipation. So, was it worth the wait?
Format: PS1 & PC
Release date: 1997
I’m not sure what to tell you about FF7. Simply put, it’s one of my all-time favourite games, and the hordes of fans it has makes me feel like a bit of a cliché to even include it in this feature. But I have to. It changed my life, I think. Before this, I had not played a game with such a deep and engaging story, an epic tale about a host of very likable characters, all unique and fleshed out with interesting back stories. It’s just wonderful.
The following took place in 2012, in the beta version of the DayZ mod for ARMA 2. It recounts the story of how I survived the zombie apocalypse by eating 87 cans of baked beans.
Chernarus is not a welcoming place any more. The lush green fields are now infested with hordes of shambling undead. And if the zombies don’t kill you, other wanderers surely will. Being alone is risky, but trusting the wrong person could cost you your life. In this harsh new world, you won’t get far without friends.
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