Why you say “Meh” to me?

March’s Roll for Discussion tables us with a bottle of Missionoyl and a trip around the world of Jazzpunk! How did we feel with Necrophone Game’s 2014 title with Kyle having his first impression and Demetri returning after a decade for a second ride on the laugh-a-second rollercoaster?

Demetri – The biggest compliment I can pay Jazzpunk is that I’ve never forgotten about it. I played the original version of this game over 10 years ago, and its endless deluge of jokes combined with its sheer unevenness left a mark on me that’s never fully healed. I had other games on deck that are far better than this in areas like “gameplay” or “being a game I’d actually recommend”, but I figured why not stress-test the show format early?

Suffice to say that I fully expected strong emotional responses to this game. What I did not and could not have foreseen was two of our players being afflicted with egregious levels of motion sickness, likely due to a combination of funky uncontrolled camera swings, slidey movement, and no on-screen crosshair. It’s almost a shame our friend group will permanently associate this with actual real life vomit, but somehow I feel like Necrophone Games wouldn’t mind.

Kyle – Combine a walking simulator with puzzle mechanics, gag-a-second style of humor plastered throughout and jam pack as many gaming references and genres as humanly possible within a 3 hr package. There are some legit laugh out loud moments scattered throughout each level but the speed and amount of gags and jokes coming out give none a real chance to breathe and fatigued the hell out of me. This is a game that absolutely can be finished in one sitting but it was best to take a break in the middle.

It’s packed to the brim with side quests and easter eggs that really reward the keen eye and the collision tester, and there’s so many pieces of this game that I missed (and am sad I didn’t naturally run into them myself), but the mental exhaustion of having the equivalence of a TikTok feed on auto-scroll baked into a functioning video game was more than my brain wanted to handle.