Indie Game of the Week 472: Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate

Welcome back to a fresh edition of Indie Game of the Week and it looks like I'm going to have to jump... into a definition of this perfectly cromulent title. Dangeresque is the corrupt cop/private eye/both alter ego of Strong Bad, designated villain of the Homestar Runner menagerie of funny internet humanoids that became appointment viewing if you were heavily invested in internet culture around the mid-to-late '00s and over the years has probably contributed as many spontaneous turns of phrase to my lexicon as The Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Dangeresque exists as an in-universe movie character, the answer to an "SBemail" (or Strong Bad Email) regarding whether Strong Bad does his own movie stunts (yes, he does) and, like Trogdor the Burninator or the Teen Girl Squad, became a popular enough bit to be revisited several times given Homestar operates on callback humor almost as frequently as Arrested Development. A Roomisode is simply an adventure game format where each episode encompasses a single room: the idea is that you have everything you need in the immediate vicinity to complete the objective you are given, similar to the Escape Room subgenre. Triungulate means there's three of them in this pack (and a secret fourth unlocked post-game). These Roomisodes were originally standalone Flash games but have been collected here with a visual makeover, additional voice acting, and other features too numerous for me to bother looking up.

Roomisode #1 is, fittingly for the noir genre, set inside Dangeresque's office as he fabricates evidence to appease the Chief.

Beyond the typical Homestar silliness this is a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure game, and by traditional I mean going back a ways: the roomisodes each have a Sierra-style points counter that not only encourages players with a point boost after they make a significant leap forward in the progression but also hands out bonuses for finding Easter eggs or completing optional sets of objectives. An example of the latter would be finding all the ways to get a premature game over in a single roomisode or threatening every NPC in the room with a plastic banana you found. The points system, just as it did in similarly unserious games like Space Quest, incentivizes players to seek out all the jokes hidden in the various combinations of interactions between your inventory and the hotspots available even if they may prove (temporarily) fatal. Other elements have been simplified, such as never requiring the player to combine items in their inventory and nothing by way of additional puzzle instances like sliding blocks or guessing passcodes from a set of hints (there are passcodes, but you only need to see them once for Dangeresque to add them to his brainventory). Given these are all set in a single room (or in the case of the second, a street intersection) they're all relatively brisk, even accounting for how the length of any given adventure game is heavily dependent on the player's perspicacity, though popping back into earlier adventures to look for the full point score might require a bit more finesse: a recurring challenge that typically rewards a single bonus point is using the talk command on every single object and NPC, and some are only present for a short time before you either pick them up or otherwise remove them.

What's going to make or break this game for you ultimately is the quality of the jokes, and like most comedic adventure games it's going to be a subjective thing that's hard to pin down whether it's your thing ahead of time. Best bet is to watch the trailer available on Steam and Itch.io to get a measure of the game's sense of humor, or else watch a few of the older Homestar Runner videos (most of which have been added to YouTube by the creators, the Brothers Chaps), but it generally relies on linguistic wordplay, nostalgic references, abstract Looney Tunes cartoon logic, and wanton cruelty to a saturnine grey blob called Strong Sad. While the Dangeresque roomisodes do drop a few references to previous Homestar Runner content it's not at the volume where you feel like you're missing half the jokes by being in the dark: it's typically certain familiar phrases and cameos from the occasional side-character like Marshie, the offputting mascot of Homestar's favorite marshmallow brand, that exist as nods for long-time fans than are the crux of the humor. I adore Homestar Runner and am always quick to lionize it but I appreciate that asking someone to watch several hours of internet cartoons to understand a video game adaptation like this would be a hard sell, and thankfully it's not that important to do that homework. You don't even have to have played the previous Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (developed by Telltale back when they still made funny adventure games rather than harrowing Sophie's Choice-a-thons) though obviously that might be the next port of call if you enjoyed this, provided you can find it for sale anywhere.

Kids today with their iPods and Zunes and Gigabeats will never appreciate the warm sounds you can only get from the Totaltronics range with their built-in sound-have.

As always with any game that heavily trades in puzzles and jokes, I can't say much more about the game without spoiling what makes it tick. Visually it resembles an adventure game from the early '90s, around the time when they were getting CD ports that included music and voice acting, which of course is right in the xennial reference zone most of Homestar Runner occupies. It even throws in some 3D polygonal cutscenes from time to time, and sometimes replaces those with real-life puppet variations to keep you guessing. For as deliberately aesthetically simple as the Homestar Runner world tends to be there's some evident craft that went into the animations here and the voice acting (all done by one guy, as per the cartoons) is as amusing as ever. Trying to do the subtitles for Coach Z feels like a full-time job on its own. The bonus episode is a bit more truncated with its interactions but no less challenging, as Dangeresque Too (the other Dangeresque, played by Homestar) is stuck in a hotel elevator trying to put a disguise together to elude armed assassins in the lobby. There's even an arcade game about carpet uplifting, RigRug, mentioned during the narrative that becomes available as a standalone mini-game once the main set of roomisodes are complete, and it's oddly compelling given how each of its ten levels adds some new wrinkle to overcome in your quest to restore every domicile's attractive hardwood floors.

It feels like Homestar's in this odd sort of place presently where the creators have long since moved onto other, better paying gigs but will occasionally pop back to animate and voice a Halloween episode (where they get all the characters to cosplay obscure pop cultural phenomenon for the fans to guess) or sign off on a board game about Trogdor or a video game like this, and since we've long past the point of the franchise's time in the sun it feels such output largely exists to appeal to its dwindling but still significant fanbase. I can imagine some younger or less terminally online adventure game fan booting this up after getting a few recommendations and being introduced to this universe of quippy oddballs in as oblique a manner as possible but still enjoying it, perhaps then exploring the vast amount of prior content based on these characters, though in my heart of hearts I know the majority of buyers are HR diehards eager to lap up any more content featuring The Cheat or Pom-Pom or Bubs (the last of whom is sadly absent here) after the Flash cartoon well long ago dried up around the time Flash itself did. Even if you missed the whole HR phenomenon but are still a fan of sharply (if absurdly) written humor, compact adventure games such as those in the escape room genre where you'll never be stymied for long given how few hotspots there are to work with, and neo-noir parodies self-aware of how goofy the edginess of underworld assassins and femme fatales can be, then I'm sure you'll enjoy this game every bit as much as the fanatic with the Señor Cardgage shirt and the Best of Limozeen on limited print vinyl.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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