I’m inexperienced with point ‘n click adventures, and only slightly aware of Homestar Runner, but venturing outside my comfort zone was rewarding.
Tony picked this one for game club this month, and it had been sitting in my Steam backlog for ages… so long, in fact, that it was no longer compatible with my OSX install. Luckily my backup PC ran it just fine; since the closure of Telltale, it’s unlikely to get any further compatibility updates.
This is one of Telltale’s early games, part of their legacy at the time of being a successor of sorts to Lucasarts’ point and click adventures. I can’t claim to be familiar with the genre but I experienced a few of the commonly cited pitfalls here: falling foul of the sometimes warped logic, where a puzzle will stump you if you don’t happen to be on the designer’s wavelength. Stumbling from place to place, enduring repeated “I can’t do that” lines as you rub every item against every interactable. Having to do certain actions multiple times to get the hints you need.
Still, the flip side is that when the penny drops and a puzzle clicks, it can be well satisfying. That rush of feeling smart is part of what carried this genre for so long, and I was pleased to experience it a few times. I only had to look up a guide thrice! And one of those was for a strategy-style minigame. I also appreciated quality of life features that reduce the tedium that held back older games in the genre: double click to run, right click to skip any dialogue, fast travel via map.
If you’re not familiar with the theming of the game, it’s based on a popular series of webtoons from the Flash era, Homestar Runner, and its breakout character Strong Bad, a mean guy with luchador style who is kind of uncool but thinks he’s the ultimate cool. The Brothers Chaps who created the series were also involved in writing, voicing, and sound/music, which along with the well-realised attempt to replicate the flat Flash animation with cel-shaded 3D graphics makes the game feel very authentic to its source. All the idiot-syncratic humour is here full of malapropisms, silly voices, and faux(?)-mean-spirited fun-poking. It’s good stuff! Also absolutely chock-a-block with inside jokes and references, so it’s worth cruising the HR wiki and watching some sbemails; apart from getting more context for the game’s gags it’s also just a fun time.
As with much of Telltale’s oeuvre this was also an episodic release, with its Wiiware version being particularly prominent (the mouse works just fine too). Each of the five parts tells a self-contained story in this very silly world, often centred around Strong Bad and his pursuits of self-aggrandisement, video games, lounging, answering emails from fans, and mocking the morons who surround him. My particular favourite was part 4, which mainly takes place inside a crappy low-budget action movie he has made; maybe the tighter focus helped me solve the puzzles, maybe I just liked the theme. The others (ruining Homestar’s reputation before a race and then reclaiming it, the characters seceding into individual micronations, a battle of the bands, and a reality-dissolving blowout mixing in the fake video games of the series) all have their highlights too, with plenty of fun setpieces and jokes.
As a noob to this genre, I did get stuck and mildly frustrated pretty often, and turning hints up to “high” didn’t always help. Luckily the aforementioned HR wiki has well-laid out guides for each episode if needed. And the game is streamlined enough that the humour and situations helped push me through tricky spots when I might have turned away. Hey, maybe these Telltale folks have got what it takes!… too soon?
