Have you ever encountered something really funny in the moment, but later, when you tried to explain it to friends, it fell flat? Not because it wasn’t hilarious. It was. But rendered in words, the scenario just loses its comedic weight. That’s what I want to avoid doing with this review, so I’m going to hold off on spoiling the jokes and just focus on what makes Jazzpunk such a uniquely designed piece of comedic video game gold.
Jazzpunk is a pop art collage masquerading as a spy thriller, a jumble of nonsensical Dadaist aesthetics interwoven with modern day tech jokes, all not-so-neatly contained within the silly, cyberpunk sandbox within which its absurd, special agent shenanigans take place. It’s all very chaotic, and I loved every second of it.
Set in some kind of alternate history, Cold War-era retrofuture, you play a possibly-cybernetic Agent Polyblank who must carry out a series of whimsical surveillance and infiltration missions in a possibly-virtual reality. Be ready for espionage drug-taking, pigeon pheromone-harvesting, stealth sushi-poisoning and lots and lots of computer puns. In one scene, I beat the shit out of a car (à la Street Fighter 2.)
But I’ll leave you to find all that on your own.
Conventionally, Jazzpunk is a first-person adventure game, carried by non-linear exploration and fueled by discovery. Discovery of what? Not new weapons or upgrades, or cool super-spy gadgets, or even important plot points. Nope – Jazzpunk is a machine sustained by jokes, and jokes are what you will encounter, uncover and have a hand in for the entirety of the game.
Many games have secrets to unlock and Easter eggs to find, a mixture of pop culture references and wink-nudges at other games – simple, unexplained humor strewn throughout their worlds, or as a reward for following some obscure series of actions. Think the kerotan frogs in Metal Gear Solid 3 or the dog ending in Silent Hill 2.
Jazzpunk is a game composed entirely of these hidden gems, though most of them are hidden in plain sight and just require your presence to trigger the punchline (or better yet, you are the punchline). Nearly every available action in Jazzpunk has some measure of rewarding, humorous reaction. Secret mini-games hidden in the unlikeliest of places. Absurd side quests with no other point than to make you laugh. In any other game, such an excessive amount of comical diversions would be pointless, but in Jazzpunk, they are the entire point.
It’s like the developers stripped away all the demanding, technically challenging, complicated elements that often go into games and kept only the playful, purely fun aspects that made us fall in love with games in the first place. Pushing buttons and having things happen. Interacting with NPCs and giggling at the resulting dialogue. Hitting stuff the game didn’t tell us to hit. Going places the game didn’t instruct us to go, and finding something that was placed there, just for us.
It’s a rewarding experience, especially because that feeling isn’t forced on us with frivolous in-game achievements or presented to us in the form of meretricious collectibles and other faux indications of accomplishment.
Jazzpunk is a game that gives us something pure, powerful and inarguably real – laughter.
Besides being a successfully hilarious game, Jazzpunk is also quite beautiful. Everything is molded in a sharp, clunky retrofuturistic aesthetic, like the campy sci-fis of ’50s and ’60s American cinema. Combined with the secret agent elements and with a dash of stylish crime drama, you could almost call it a technicolor film noir, a sleek, fashionable, neon-tinged world of shifty characters, secret plots and corruption amid a kitschy, pop art landscape.
The game isn’t set entirely in a vintage American cybercollage, though. From the Soviet consulate to a back-alley Sushi bar in Japan, to a generically “exotic” Tiki resort inhabited by white surfer bros and valley girls, your undercover hijinks will take you all around the world… like, literally all around it, if you’re bad at geography. You’ll know what I mean.
The game is fairly short, which is never a complaint if the work maintains its quality throughout and accomplishes what it set out to do, which Jazzpunk most definitely does. The ending is rather abrupt, though, and I was expecting at least one more segment as closure.
Despite this, thinking back on my zig-zaggy travels throughout the game’s worlds, I find myself pondering if there was anything I missed… a joke stashed away in a back alley… a gag still waiting to be triggered… a prank longing to be pulled. I’m sure there are many.
I’ll be returning to the world of Jazzpunk to follow through on my leftover joke-seeking quest, an easy task given its convenient mission selection system that lets you hop through its various segments. Meanwhile, newcomers to its whimsical world can find the game on Steam or the Humble Store for PC, Mac and Linux. It will be $11.99 until February 14th, when it reverts back to its original price of $14.99.
What’re you waiting for, Polyblank? Suit up, cyberjack into the netrix and wire over your cash dollars! And watch this live-action trailer while you’re at it. You won’t regret it.
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