I knew something was off the moment the first randomized battle hit. Traditionally in RPGs this is a somewhat solemn moment; the first fight, where you know things won’t be too hard, and yet you still feel unsure of exactly how it’s going to go, signaled by some audio disruption to the world map. But here your clarion to fight for your life against mutant hordes isn’t the expected threatening minor chord or a crunchy battle sound effect—it’s a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ funhouse clown horn!?
This sums up the entire atmosphere of this incredible game. Like other Andi Hagen RPGs it blends traditional mechanics with an irresistible penchant for black humour, post-human apocalypse, map exploration, and the sheer joy of stumbling across weird stuff just lying around the place.
The plot feels like it’s a mutant episode of Gilligan’s Island filtered through the prophetic memory of that tribe of kids in Mad Max 3 that worships old slideshow pictures and broken TVs. The fact that you get to pick your party entirely from 12 incredibly designed characters (no enforced faceless protagonist!) is underscored by the sheer charm of the writing Hagen laboriously undertook for each and every one of them. Your random party will coalesce through the sheer screwball individuality of each character into a very special blend of combinatorial freakshow.
My haphazardly chosen party for example really benefited from the manic optimism of the irradiated skeleton, tempered by the neurotic hypochondria of the insectoid test subject, bridged soberly by the stoic pronouncements of the cephalopod monk, and occasionally enlivened by the pretentious pronouncements of the bourgeois epicurean invertebrate. And that was just one possible combination of voices! There’s even a “randomized party” option too.
The battle and leveling mechanics are swell too, with enough juicy details and quirky choices to make them interesting. For example, there’s no ability to flee combat. But on the other hand, all characters have a “rest” option that means you can heal yourself in lieu of an attack without needing a special ability or spell. (Kinda makes sense really, if you think about it, the amount of things in your life just cured by resting up???)
Arguably the main attraction isn’t even the battle/crawling/leveling cycle of standard RPG gameplay, but the exploitation of this mechanic for its ability to underscore weird little moments on the way. This is something Hagen always does incredibly subtly and partially what I think gives his games that special feeling they have. It is reminiscent of his previous game Xoo: Xeno Xafari, but combined with some of the more kinetic ultraviolence and macabre humour of Void Pyramid.
Is it an RPG, or just a disguised beach-combing simulation? There’s plenty reminiscent of Ballard’s Vermillion Sands stories at play here—decadent post-collapse beach resort setting, poetic confrontations with outlandish junk, bewildering eccentrics searching for obscure objects of desire. Some of the best moments in the game come from the individual character reactions to the heaps of macabre junk littered across the beaches of the irradiated island. They mix screwball comedy with elegiac melancholy, and allow the characters to express their quirks:
“These lonely bodies fill my soul with bitter poetry.” While no one is looking, Magnifico eats one of the fish skeletons.
And occasionally, these descriptions are just detached entirely from the characters or the plot, little wonderful prose poems that send you off into a mental spiral. Andi’s prose is incredible. Who wouldn’t seethe with envy at being able to write like this for an off-the-cuff scene:
Two geodesic domes glint beneath mounds of sand, trash, and bird feces. Out on the water, a titanic sea slug squirms as it is digested alive by seaweed. The way it’s going, the process might take years.
But it’s hard to say what voices Hagen writes better: mutants, or robots? My favourite mechanic in this whole game has nothing to do with combat but with the Buddy terminals littered across the dying landscape. These things give you EXP for listening to a brief touristic description of the delights on offer in the immediate area. This is almost always incredibly ironic, because the amenities have inevitably morphed into some horror or another (charred bodies, mutant plant life, searing craters). The Buddy terminals speak with a perfect detached “robot” personality, nominally churning through its mechanism, that is “not programmed to feel sadness, but…”
The items, weapons, and relic titles are another sheer joy in this game. Pure inspiration drawing from any and all paradigms of junk, garbage, disjecta membra: you’ll be equipping empty inhalers, pool noodles, headphones and squirt guns.
Those players of taste familiar with Hagen’s Void Pyramid may remember a moment in that game, near the end, when you have the choice to risk it all by stepping into a mutation chamber. The game warns you you will simply not be the same afterwards; your sprite changes into a smooth, anonymous humanoid and your stats are randomized; basically all the work you put into personalizing the character you grew accustomed to is obliterated in an instant. It’s a shocking, uncanny but somehow silly occurrence that never left me.
Fun Zone Omega feels like that one moment, stretched out into an entire adventure.
