1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF FEBRUARY 4 | HUMOR IN GAMES
Cover Story: Humor In Games
This Week, 1UP embraces the lighter side of our medium.
Last week got pretty heavy, and deservedly so. When tackling the topic like violence, discussions have a tendency to gain a bit of extra weight to them. So as a follow-up, we decided to swing the pendulum of our focus back towards the opposite side of the spectrum and discuss how video games have the ability to make us grin like complete idiots.
While preparing to write this introduction, I got to thinking about the first games that ever made me genuinely laugh. As 1UP's resident youngin', I didn't get a chance to play and appreciate games like Escape From Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle until my interest in our medium's past ramped up in the aughts. It was games in the mid to late '90s that really opened my eyes to just how much creative potential our medium had to offer. The first may have been EarthBound, due to its surreal writing and outrageous portrayal of Americana. But it wasn't until I helped guide Manny through the underworld of Grim Fandango in '98 that I realized how being able to interact with a well-crafted joke made the punch line that much more effective.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF FEBRUARY 4 | HUMOR IN GAMES
Se7en: The Double Fine Adventure Game Edition
Cover Story: "If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth." 1 John 1:8
The following piece contains a whole mess of spoilers regarding The Cave. You've been warned.
T
he Cave is not a funny game. At least, it isn't funny unless you consider murder, gross criminal negligence, arson, sabotage, patricide, genocide, nuclear war, and altering the very fabric of space-time for personal gain to be trifling affairs. Ron Gilbert's latest laugh-a-minute adventure game may seem like a bit of light humor on the surface, but it's those crimes against humanity that color the plot at every turn.
I can't remember the last time was genuinely terrified while playing a video game. Slender? Amnesia? Silent Hill 2? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of any work of art that can elicit true fear inside of me, be it a film, story, or video game. But most games that bill themselves as "horror" are more concerned with cheap scares and crutching on gore than with building a mood which toys with our deepest fears. So it was to my complete surprise that Naughty Dog seems to understand this definition perfectly, as The Last of Us could very well be one of this generation's truly horrifying experiences.
So many elements of the game seem to coexist for the common goal of creating and maintaining an extraordinary level of tension. E3 showed us what Joel and Ellie would have to deal with in terms of human marauders who've been pushed to the fringes of humanity, but this preview event focused squarely on the fungal infection that caused the world to go to hell in the first place. It's here that The Last of Us almost feels like it's picking up the survival horror baton that so many once-terrifying series have dropped in recent installments. The world it builds, the aesthetics it fronts, and the moods it exudes are singularly terrifying and completely fantastic, and it all starts with the impeccable sound design.
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