While The Fractured But Whole improves on combat and customization, I came here for the story, and its story feels like someone took a joke that should’ve lasted one South Park episode and stretched it longer than Randy can go without turning a minor inconvenience into a national crisis. The superhero theme wears out its welcome quickly, and the mystery plot becomes so convoluted that it starts feeling less like satire and more like homework.
The biggest problem is that this kind of story works far better in a 20-minute episode than in a 20+ hour RPG. South Park’s best jokes hit hard, get their laugh, and move on. Here, the game keeps dragging the same joke through combat encounter after combat encounter like a dead horse that’s been resurrected, beaten again, and then given DLC so it can be beaten some more. I felt less like I was solving a mystery and more like Butters being forced to sit through another one of Cartman’s increasingly deranged business ventures.
The Stick of Truth constantly escalates into increasingly absurd situations and somehow keeps getting funnier. The Fractured But Whole spends so much time trying to convince you its mystery is clever that it forgets to be entertaining. By the end, I wasn’t wondering who solved the case—I was wondering if I could file a missing persons report for the time I’d spent playing it. The plot has so many twists and detours that it starts to resemble one of Mr. Garrison’s classroom lectures: it keeps going, gets progressively more unhinged, and eventually you can’t remember what the original point was.
If you’re here for the story, save yourself the trouble. The Stick of Truth feels like a classic South Park episode. The Fractured But Whole feels like an episode that accidentally got trapped in a time loop and forgot how to end, like a Family Guy episode that keeps cutting to random gags instead of a plot, except even the cutaways eventually give up and ask what the story is supposed to be.
I’d give it a 5.0/10
Respect my authoritah… and my refund request
