Indie Game of the Week 469: Death of the Reprobate

Well, here we are with the third game in Joe Richardson's trilogy, otherwise known as the Immortal John Triptych, of adventure games following Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary in which every character, prop, background, and diegetic musician has been sourced from a gallery of Renaissance-era art and modified to befit whatever twisted narrative is being told on this occasion. Honestly, it's a challenge to review these games not because they're bad (because in that case I'd have plenty to say) or that they're uneventful (certainly not this one) but because so much of the appeal rests upon figuring out the puzzles and appreciating the jokes. And you can't really spoil either of those if you want to avoid the internet's wrath, and I still kinda do want to do that. Or not do that. Sorry, I'm writing this review at 3am on a Friday night, bear with me.

Death of the Reprobate sees the triptych's namesake connective character, Immortal John, on his deathbed as he's visited by his son Malcolm the Shit, a less-than-popular provisional tyrant who attends to his dying father so that he might inherit the land and everything it contains. Instead, Immortal John condemns him as the Shit he is accurately named for being, only to be told in response that John himself was a terrible sinner that successfully found atonement later in life. With this gotcha, Malcolm is given one chance: do seven good deeds (portentous number, that) before the sun sets on both Immortal John's seaside cottage home and, likely, Immortal John himself. Though relatively short in both geography and goals to accomplish, the game finds a suitable puzzle difficulty balance as you go about first finding all seven troubled souls in need of succor—the Lord Almighty, Jesus Christ, is on-hand with some helpful signs to point these people out—and then resolving their conundrums. Conundra? These might include a woman searching for a husband (he's currently infatuated with a girl who greatly resembles that one portrait of Ophelia floating in the river), a fisherman who is struggling to catch his quarry due to some troublemakers throwing rocks in the river nearby, and a man surrounded by screaming kids all with their own separate demands to fulfill.

The Lord provides guidance to those who seek it. Usually a little less overtly than this, though.

Death of the Reprobate is paradoxically more accommodating than his previous works while also being more troll-y. The former in the guise of a helpful genie who will give you more-than-direct hints for accomplishing your myriad of goals. An example of the latter involves a number puzzle in the local pub full of gambling ne'er-do-wells who bid you to bet with them on a dice game performed by monkeys with a backgammon board (man, they really just painted any old shit back then, huh). The idea, as it's pitched to you, is that there's a system where you take clues from various onlookers, then modify the results based on the interjections of a couple of local souses, and through all that you can unerringly predict the result of the monkeys' throws. It took quite a while to decipher what all these rules were and, well, let's not go into how that whole situation resolved except to say I felt profoundly dumb for investing as much time as I did into a puzzle that clearly was meant to be taken a bit more laterally than I was anticipating. "Fair do"s to the developers of course—adventure games thrive on their unpredictability, after all—but there was a permeating feeling of "I arbitrarily decided that I was on the hook for three of these due to my own rash choices, so let's just get nutty with this last chapter" from its creator. No single trait of the game exemplifies that more than the way it ends, but I'll avoid spoilers for the reasons aforementioned regarding the internet and the angry mobs thereof.

The attention to worldbuilding is such that you can find these dramatic little asides if you know where to look for them. Truly, it paints a rich canvas of life in the early Middle Ages with the seasoned eye of a history expert. Well, paints something with something anyway.

Beyond all that there's very little else to criticize. There are some tasks that feel like pointless busywork (unless you really like ornithology that's an excuse for naughty bird puns), plenty of actual penises if that's something you don't care to see (and I won't tell anyone if it's the opposite), a somewhat vaguely presented final hurdle to overcome to see the game's ending, a real small handful of typos (those "who's"/"whose" are gonna getcha), and it's blasphemous as all get out if you've only just arrived in the 21st century and that's still a thing that rankles. It's also pretty brief but I tend to find that's less of a problem with adventure games than it can be with other genres; there's also the fact that, given all our thought patterns don't necessarily sync up, some puzzles might take one person longer than another and nailing a specific hour count isn't always feasible or fair (I completed the game in three hours, for at least a semi-helpful yardstick, and felt it was time and money well spent).

In short, Death of the Reprobate is about the best way Richardson could've capped off this trilogy of ecclesiastical misadventures via the aesthetic magic of the Old Masters, many of whom are probably more deserving than being associated with the high frequency of poop and dick jokes found here. At the same time the writing continues to exhibit a wit that is often at odds with the puerile humor—like a literature major academically drawn to the Bard's works that eventually has to contend with how often Shakespeare put crude sex goofs in his comedies to appeal to the peanut gallery—that makes it absolutely worth your time to seek out every NPC and incidental hotspot you can find. As always, there's an actual in-game art gallery to visit if you ever wanted to know the sources for all of the imagery depicted, so the game can double as an educational stroll through several centuries of art history if you wanted it to. Or you can instead spend a considerable amount of time murdering birds, blowing raspberries at priests, or feeding pink cow shit to a bawling child while pretending it's a milkshake. (I bet Dan would love this series come to think of it, even with his usual aversion to adventure games.) The entire Immortal John Triptych is dropping on Switch and its more expensive younger brother sometime later this year, and I cannot recommend them enough if you miss the days of LucasArts point-and-clicks where being a hilarious psycho was more often than not the goal than something censurable.

It's been a heck of a run but something tells me the developer was ready to move on. Just my intuition as a long-time media critic.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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