Death of the Reprobate

Not quite as good as the previous two games in the series, but Death of the Reprobate makes up for it with a hell of an ending

Very cool game. Music gets annoying almost instantly. Otherwise great. Not great enough to maker me interested in the other games in the series. There is no replay value and it didn't take long to finish. The main reason it took more than 2 hours is you can't skip text. Get it on sale.

EXCEPTIONNELLEMENT DROLE

Still great, laughed until died.

beautifully crafted and delightfully stupid at times. 10/10

Bro. I at first wrote a review for this game that was critical but still gave the thumbs up, but upon reflecting on this game again, actually, I don't think this game warrants a thumbs up. I did like the series, so I think I tried to see it more sympathetically, but in every metric where this game has to stand on it's own, Death of the Reprobate is simply just a very bad, not thought-through game, that has a few good moments here and there. I think the first game, Four Last Things, wasn't as up my alley as the second one, Procession to Calvary - so I will mostly compare to the second one, especially since it's still fresh in my mind. First of all the riddles - except for maybe 2 exceptions - were either laughably easy, and everything was handed to you in obvious ways, or they were so stupid and contrived I wasn't even mad that I asked the in-game guy who solves the riddles for you. (this is about the cow riddle in particular, but I will come back to that one) Second of all, the humour really took a turn for the worse. Where in the second game, the jokes might have been edgy, and sometimes even a bit outrageous (like a quest where you have to procure a young boy for a priest) it always knew how to reel it back in (the joke gets subverted when you figure out the priest feels guilt for the death of his son and wants to raise another kid to make amends, which then is funny in itself) - the humour in this game mostly is "haha b*oobs" and "haha two men making out" or "haha kill everyone and gore" - but it also loses this ability to reel it back in, before getting too crazy. (this is again about the cow quest, but we will get there) One other comment said this really well - the aspect of gross generalisations and a juvenile worldview have always been in this series, but for this game, the dev seems to have thought of it as NOT to be one of it's weaker qualities, but actually, the whole essence of the series. This game has no nuance, and it's nihilistic humor is pointed at everyone. And I do have to think that when other people say that this game has "deep cutting social criticism" they mean the millionth "this priest is a p*edo" joke - which is not a provocative joke or new statement in *any* universe. This game has an embarrsingly nihilistic worldview, no ability to be profound or genuine, and constantly is hiding behind edginess and irony. This game has no deeper insights than "religion is bad", "everyone sucks", and "hahaha killing people is provocative". And a smaller point I can't get in anywhere else: I felt like the 1st game had too much of an open world, which made remembering all the areas hard and overwhelmed the player with interactions. And then it felt like the second game really compressed the area into a well-understandable map where locations are re-used a lot, which made the world feel way more alive in turn. While I don't think the third game regressed on all of that, some areas in the game were entirely useless. There is a part of the map (a path with a character and a church you can enter with 4 people in it) that isn't relevant for even ONE quest, and most other areas are one-interaction-only. This dev, at least in the first game, calls this series "art" - and I would agree for the other two games, but this one is juvenile, and ridiculous, and has nothing interesting to say. I don't think it's ridiculous to expect themes, or even coherent thoughts from a game that wants to be art. I can't really discuss this without getting into spoilers, so if you don't want to read them, skip to the last paragraph. This starts with the overall "message" the game (maybe?) has - you want to do 7 good things, but because you are a fundamentally rotten person, you do all of them by causing harm and only caring about getting the "task" done. Though then in the end, it seems like the dev was more interested in shoe-horning in the 7 deadly sins, than actually making riddles where you actually *do* something bad. E.g. you help a struggling fisherman who cant catch fish because he's incompetent, and also because people are throwing rocks into the lake. Then, in the end, the game says helping him was bad, because he was an evil poacher who was exploiting the area - which is NOT actually mentioned IN the quest, even though it would have been really easy to write the quest that way in the first place! The people in the area could have literally been throwing the rocks BECAUSE he's a poacher, which then would have made YOU a conscious villain for helping him get rid of the rock throwers anyways. But the way it was handled, it just felt like the dev needed a last minute reason, why helping the man was evil. And most of the other quests have similarly contrived reasons for why you were an "evil" person to do them. Which makes the conclusion of the game feel like a nothingburger, and not a deserved ending to the story. The one exception maybe being the cow quest that I mentioned earlier - I wish I had time to get into everything about it that sucks, but God, just describing this quest is so embarrassing. You are supposed to help an "overwhelmed" father take care of his crying children (the father may have been the one instance of okay-ish social criticism that I can name in this game) - one of his children is hungry and you get a rhyming riddle for what to feed the child. The answer to that quest is entirely contrived and doesn't even make any in-world sense, but you have to feed strawberries to a cow and then give the baby the strawberry-poop. That is literally the solution. The riddle isn't even phrased in a way that warrants this. Feeding mashed strawberries to the child would have been fine, too. It's both a dumb riddle, and also embarrassingly juvenile. I guess it had to be cow poop because the joke is that children suck and should be hated, and thus they deserve being fed poop. hahaha. riveting. I would would have been able to get behind this if the joke had been that the protagonist is just lazy and unempathetic, but clearly, the joke is that that child is soo annoying and deserves it. Oh my God, grow up. The game ends with a monologue from the dev who tells you he loathes making these games and doesn't want to make another one, and to prevent people from asking for more he burns down the whole world, while holding a monologue that he doesn't want to design good riddles? I do understand that this is a joke, but given that the riddles in the game were genuinely bad and I paid money for this, I think it's… quite audacious. To conclude, this game feels like it forgot that it's supposed to mean anything or say anything interesting. Or at least have a few good riddles. It's so embarrasingly juvenile and the whole game feels like playing a bad South Park episode. If you mean to play through the whole series, go for it, but at least buy it on sale.

A Monthy Python point-and-click. Genius.