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.
Format: Sega Mega Drive
Year: 1992
Another rare game in my long list of memories that include my brother, Sam, is Streets of Rage 2. It was the best in a trilogy of side scrolling beat-em-ups on the Sega Mega Drive. (Genesis in America). We would always play as the same 2 characters: I was Axel, and my brother would be Skate. He loved the agility and bombastic acrobatics that the tiny skater dude could pull off. Many of the boss fights would end with Sam leaping onto their necks and pummelling them in the back of the head. I liked Axel’s swinging flaming punch, and his multi-hit special combo. It’s a simple but satisfying game built around stylised hand to hand violence.
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.
Years: 1996 – 2003
To this day, the N64 holds my fondest gaming memories on a console. The PC may have stolen my heart eventually, but I’ll never forget the fun of my childhood, playing multiplayer games on my N64 with a bunch of mates after school, and during sleepovers.
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