Where would YouTubers be without snark?
The popular currency of new media millionaires and upstart channels alike tends to be a sardonic kind of wit. No matter the game, be it the latest big budget shooter or a barely crowdfunded platformer, if the beaming personality in the box on the top left of the screen isn’t wryly bringing up every possible nitpick, the video might as well be a walkthrough. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III, the finale of the action role-playing game franchise from NeocoreGames, isn’t going to wait for someone to play it for the wry witticisms to start. The game’s snarky script preempts most of the obvious quips on the action role-playing game formula, pop culture, and its world at large, making the game feel like it’s almost making a Let’s Play video by itself.
I sat down with NeocoreGames earlier this month in VentureBeat’s San Francisco office to peruse three different environments of a pre-release build of the game. Things began rather normally for an action-RPG, as the series protagonist Van Helsing combated several groups of shambling horrors with his spectral companion Lady Katarina. You can customize your hero’s first name, so I named the Van Helsing of my demo “Fireizcool” because he was part of the magic class known as the elementalist, and I am a mature human being. Amid all of the abominable creations of weird science (the game’s take on steampunk-ish, Victorian mad science) were a few prisoners standing behind bars.
Making fun of yourself: the game
Van Helsing let one prisoner out as part of a side quest. The other prisoner could not be set free, and had on clothing familiar to any fans of late ’90s Marvel Comics movies. Opening a dialogue with the gentleman encouraged him to monologue at length about his life’s work murdering vampires. The speech continues for a few moments before Katarina interrupts the vampire-hunter by remembering why this vampire hunter was in jail: tax evasion. That kind of out-of-place pop culture reference has been a common joke tactic, especially for action RPGs, for decades. But rarely has it been a precursor to an entire game script refusing to take itself seriously.
Since Van Helsing and Katarina’s encounter with Not-Blade-For-Copyright-Reasons, every scene seemed to go out of its way to take apart the world around it, and especially poke fun at the obligations of being in such a world. Van Helsing himself seemed cut from the same cloth as animated MTV-show title character Daria Morgendorfer (although not operating on that same dry level, at least so far), remiss to leave any annoying design habit or role-playing game routine go without sarcastic comment. His ghostly partner Lady Katarina was no slouch in the witty retort department either.
In one of the preview’s later environments, every single dialogue with an NPC included an option for Van Helsing to curtly dismiss a sidequest or dialogue exchange for being pointless. The monster-hunter could rightly refuse the request of a villager barred behind the door on the grounds that hunting for minute items in a gigantic map was far beneath the efforts of the savior of the world. When Van Helsing and Katarina came across a glowing rock in the middle of an enchanted forest, both agreed instantaneously that it would spawn monsters — before touching it and spawning monsters. Just as I was about to vocalize the dissonance of Van Helsing doing that which frustrated him endlessly, the monster-hunter spouted off that exact hypocrisy in an aggravated huff.
Dedicated online humorists could avoid a lot of the more sarcastic quips in The Incredible Van Helsing III by not selecting the more obviously snarky dialogue options. It won’t stop the game from having an executioner torture a prisoner with bad poetry, though. Despite its gothic dressings and moody environments, the writers of Van Helsing III are actively trying to deflate all possible seriousness around the game from the inside. If this level of self-Let’s Playing becomes a trend, I hope the next wave of Youtube-emulating games start unboxing themselves.