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I’ve laughed with a lot of games lately. It makes me realize how high the writing bar for games has risen over the past few years. Whereas I’m seeing a lot of indie titles and smaller games play with fourth-wall meta-humor, at the other end of the spectrum I’m seeing a lot of high-production-value AA and AAA titles really focus on the quality of their writing, and branch out in different directions. One of the directions I’ve been most impressed by is humor. I actually had to step away from Tales of Zestiria today because I was laughing so hard at a particular scene.

Something I’m seeing a lot more of is topical, in-world humor. There are, broadly, two ways to get a laugh in a game. You can set up a joke that’s funny for the player but isn’t actually a joke in the context of the game, and you can set up a joke that’s funny in the context of the game and makes the player laugh, too. The second one is much, much more difficult to write, yet I’m starting to see it more in games.

As an example, KOTOR’s HK-47 is an example of the first kind of humor. HK-47’s thinly veiled menace and explicit, utter vehemence can be pretty funny, for you as the player. As the character standing right next to HK-47, he’s concerning at best and outright horrifying at worst; there’s no laughing along with his lines without being an utter psychopath. HK-47 separates you from the game world, and nods to you as the player while ignoring the character representing you in the world. In a similar vein, pop-culture references and other, similar in-jokes are another example– funny to you as the player but meaningless or tasteless for the character. Both are a LOT easier to write than jokes that are funny in-context.

In-context jokes are the kind of thing that would legitimately make a character in the game world laugh if they heard them. A lot of times these are one-liners, but you can get a more deliberate setup. They’re a lot more difficult to write because you have to have spent a lot of time setting up the game world’s environment and character personalities and, in general, laying down the ‘rules’ for how the world works and what social mores exist before the joke makes sense. Even then, it can fall flat if the player isn’t invested in the setting, or if you get the timing wrong and have an NPC laugh just a bit too early, or the wrong way, or deliver a line anything less than perfectly. It’s pretty rare that you laugh alongside an NPC in a game, because getting that timing down is not easy.

Mostly, this is the result of witty banter between characters, but sometimes it’s even subtler than that. Recently, I played a game where the characters ran across a landmark and, while looking at it, one of my party members made an absolutely awful pun which was followed by another character firing off a snappy quip, which made me chuckle. What got me was having yet another character, randomly while walking a little bit later, pipe up with “OH! I just got it!”, sparking another snappy quip that I (alongside some other party members) laughed at. A little bit later, that character pipes up AGAIN, having just gotten the original snappy comeback, and I found myself waiting for the other (third?) shoe to drop as we caught up to the last joke made at her expense. Just as I’d nearly forgotten about it (this is minutes later, as I wander through a dungeon), the character making the quips checks in: “Did you… not get that last joke?” as other party members (and I) snicker. The game actually waited until I was in combat, fighting for my life, to have the character go “OH! THAT WAS THE JOKE!” in response to the boss saying something vaguely reminescent of a previous quip.

Put another way, any time you “had to be there” for a joke to work, it’s probably an in-context joke. They’re a LOT harder to pull off, yet I’ve seen them in a bunch of games lately.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a bunch of credit not only to Tales of Zestiria for making me laugh, but also Knights of the Fallen Empire, the new SWTOR expansion. The writing team really nailed the humor in that expansion pack, and it really works through a lot of the content. It manages to balance serious characters who I legitimately look forward to bringing down with moments that crack me up or just make me happy in general. Pacing is really important, and having some laughs throughout the experience really helps.

It’s something I really notice when I go back and play older games. The writing quality just isn’t there, most of the time, and the sense of timing and pacing is much, much poorer, when it exists at all. I suspect a lot of it has to do with modern games’ shift towards voice acting, which helps deliver comedy a lot, but it isn’t just that. We’ve gotten better at writing, for the most part, and so when writing isn’t quite as good it’s really noticeable. I do a lot more laughing *at* older games than laughing *with* older games.

All of that having been said, I’m glad to be laughing as I play games. Delivering depressing sadness and yanking at heartstrings in all of my game releases has gotten a bit old; I can see the setups coming a mile away at this point, and I’m getting numb to them. A good laugh, though, catches me by surprise. It’s great.

Secrets of Grindea is a great little jaunt through a Zelda-style world with a ton of RPG-style character customization and a lot of self-aware humor. It’s like Children of Mana meets A Link to the Past, and it’s frankly delightful. It’s probably the only Steam Early Access game that I haven’t minded playing before it’s finished, and for me that Early Access tag is often a great big warning sign: “Wait for a while to see if this actually releases before playing”.

One of the comments that came up on the podcast is that SoG is a retro-styled game that isn’t relying exclusively on nostalgia to prop it up. It’s a great description, and I pretty much completely agree with it. It’s the Zelda game that Nintendo will never make, because it’s designed for people who grew up on Zelda but have since moved on to more challenging, more complex games. Secrets of Grindea delivers on that– the bosses are MUCH more complicated and difficult than Zelda bosses, and progression is similarly advanced.

My two biggest complaints with the game are the animation delay when swinging your weapon– it’s a gorgeous animation but it stops you dead, so it’s very difficult to stay mobile as a melee character– and the lack of a reasonable “full respec” option. Ashgar says this has a lot more to do with the fact that we played co-op (did I mention this game has a perfectly reasonable co-op story mode?) and thus had XP coming in a lot faster than money, but this is the sort of thing that needs a rebalance pretty badly. Presumably that’s something that can be done in the Early Access phase. Anyway, I found it easy to get locked into a build that I couldn’t do much about and wasn’t as functional as I would’ve liked. On the other hand, I thought it was awesome being able to fill in party roles in co-op; Kodra was playing a character build that would have been entirely untenable had he been playing solo, but was both functional and awesome in a group.

The game cheerfully pokes fun at RPG and Zelda tropes without forgetting that both of those types of games are genuinely fun and awesome. A lot of parody games fall into the trap of just blasting away at a particular genre in the guise of “parody” and forget that there’s a reason people like those games in the first place. Secrets of Grindea hits a nice balance of both parody and genuine cheer, and it takes some jokes seen elsewhere and pulls them off extremely well.

The best part about this game, for me, is the co-op multiplayer. This is probably not a shocker to anyone– I’ve talked a lot about how much I like small-group multiplayer co-op, but SoG reminds me that I almost don’t care about the genre; running around a game with my friends experimenting is a lot of fun. One thing I want in Grindea (though it looks like it’ll be added, given some of the NYI progression options) is a stronger “support” playstyle, with some heals and protection. It would really round out the rest of the group, which is mostly super defensive or super offensive, but lacks terribly much in the way of force multipliers. Another thing I think would be interesting to see is some more battlefield control options, slows and binds and knockbacks and whatnot– possibly I just didn’t see them in our playthrough, but they seemed relatively rare.

All in all, though, the game is a lot of fun and I have no problem recommending it, even as an Early Access title. Even the unfinished story was fun enough to be worth the price of the game, and there’re updates coming apparently fairly regularly.

I don’t get to talk much about the games I’m playing anymore. I’ve gotten very good at talking around them, being suggestive but vague, so as to avoid the constant concern about spoilers. It’s not very satisfying. Some of the most impressive game experiences I’ve had have been reduced to “it’s really neat!” and a desperate hope that someone else I know plays through it so that I can talk about it openly. It doesn’t happen much, but there’s always the possibility that someone is going to play whatever game, so I still can’t talk about it.

It’s frustrating for me, because games are a social space. I may have mentioned previously that I don’t watch TV on my own, and the quick, flippant explanation I give is that years of interactive media have made me fidgety when just watching a show, and I like to have someone else around to talk to and share the experience with. That latter part is very true, but it’s also because what I want is someone to talk to about what I’ve experienced, who I know is in the same place I am. The delicate dance around spoilers runs extremely deep, and I catch myself shushing people who are a little too open about them, and hating myself for it. As before, games are social for me, and if I can’t talk about them, what’s the point?

I get similarly antsy when there’s nothing my friends and I are playing together. Without someone to share the experience with, games and honestly, most media feel someone empty and uninteresting. This doesn’t necessarily mean multiplayer, and in fact often doesn’t– it just means we’re in the same place and experiencing the same things, so we naturally have something to talk about.

It calls to mind the experience of playing Heavensward. Twenty or thirty of us were hanging around regularly, NOT talking about the game we were all playing together, dancing delicately around spoilers. By the time we actually talked about it (relegated to a specific Aggrochat episode, where the reins were off), the exciting glow of the experience had dimmed somewhat. The Aggrochat Game of the Month has a similar effect– we all play the game together but often pointedly avoid talking about it until “it’s time”. I’ve started playing the GotMs a lot closer to time, just so they’re fresher in my mind when we talk about them.

My game is coming up for our Game of the Month, and I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the crew into a) not keeping mum about it until the show and b) keeping the muzzle off for spoilers. It’s going to be a big enough game that we can all go our separate ways and do different things; in this case I think spoilers might actually add to the experience we all have rather than detract.

Really, though, I just want to talk about the experiences I’m having without worrying that someone is going to jump down my throat about sharing them. I’ve long since passed the point where I find experiences for their own sake terribly compelling; my experiences have meaning when shared with other people. I respect other people’s wishes to keep said experiences pristine and fresh and new, but I’ve realized that in so doing, I’m denying myself a huge part of the enjoyment I get.

I don’t know of a good solution to this. I know that it’s lately left me listless about various games I’m playing, even the compelling ones. Maybe I’m just waiting for a kickstart.