What's Hot: Great art and style, at times very funny; nice combat controls; good price

What's Not: Lasts about six hours; some dialogue falls flat; not too tough

It’s hard to be a fan of gaming over the past several years and not know about Penny Arcade, the comic strip that not only skewers every aspect of gaming three times a week but also launched the careers of Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik. After years of taking pretty much every one even remotely involved in gaming to task they’ve teamed up with Hothead Games to create an episodic RPG-adventure mash-up that combines the vulgar humor that the site is known for with a steampunk aesthetic. The result is a fun, albeit short romp through the PA world of yore with plenty of satisfying battles, hilarious writing and offensive felines.

On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One takes place in the city of New Arcadia, circa 1922, an American ‘every town’ that just happens to be beset by small fornicating robots, killer mimes, foul hobos and devious clowns. You know, one of those kinds of towns. After creating your character through the slick, but somewhat limited character creation screen, you’re given the unenviable task of raking your front yard.

Luckily the yard work doesn’t last long as a humongous robot smashes your house leaving you not only homeless, but thirsty for revenge against the mechanical pervert that wrecked your crib. Armed with only your rake, you team up with Tycho and Gabriel and you’re off adventuring.

The game follows a semi-turn based combat system reminiscent of the many JRPG’s that have been gracing consoles for years. As you progress through the game you’ll amass a small contingent of support characters that provide special attacks, all of which require more recharge time than those of the primary characters, but do a heck of a lot more damage.

The support characters aren’t the only characters with special attacks as you, Gabe and Tycho all have “Overkill” attacks that are triggered by mini-games. For example, Gabriel’s attack has you mashing buttons to fill up a vertical bar. Once full, the bar descends and you press A again to stop the bar within the specified area. Getting the timing just right unleashes the full amount of extra damage as well as gives the opportunity to kill an enemy with the Overkill attack, netting you an Overkill bonus that grants you a permanent damage boost stat increase. If more than one character’s Overkill attack is charged up you can choose to forego the mini-games and go into a combo attack instead.

The combat is fast paced and well implemented. At the beginning, keeping an eye on your party and applying healing items appropriately is essential however you soon hit a point where it’s rare to die. This results in a situation where battles aren’t frustrating, but at the same time they’re not particularly challenging either. It’s still fun though, and once you get used to the combat you can learn how fights ebb and flow so that you constantly are attacking and never giving your enemies the chance to cause damage.