u/Normal-Oil1524

I mean, doesn’t everyone?

I’m not sure how much of the funny you like in your games, or if you prefer more grounded serious stories. I like both (some like horror don’t really have much space for comedy) but I have an instant soft spot activate if the humor is good. Something like GTA (particularly Vice City and San Andreas) would never be as good as it was if there weren’t all these comic takes on American culture, these references, that made it so good as a full product. GTA 5 is up there but less so than the previous games, I think.

What I really love is when RPGs do it, though. I still remember when my brother bought me Fable Anniversary and it was a wildly inadequate game (maybe) for a 9-year old but it had that type of low comedy slapstick fantasy setting that you could just fall in love with. To my 9 year old brain, it felt literally like Shrek the RPG (or equivalent set in the Shrek universe) with how unreal its parody was. Also, unchecked murder. So few RPGs truly let you commit down that path like Fable did when it came out. I think that was the game that made me truly appreciate comic touches in gaming (that and GTA of course) but it was mostly indie games that kept that comic streak going as more mainstream games went super hard into serious narratives, or just toned down humor and made it prohibitively PC in some cases, as in legitimately unfunny or forced. 

Let me just mention Undertale here, whole game feels like the best joke in the universe once you get. I think everyone who’s played it can agree on it. Nothing quite like it afterwards, but it was the PEAK of video game humor in the least expected of places. It’s the wacky kind of indie that literally comes out once in a decade.

I like the darker sort of humor personally, where the funny comes from something truly terrible (idk why I’m like that but whatever), so the indies that I wishlisted because of that are few and far between. I’ll just name 2 that got me interested because of the dark humor in their premise

• Chicklet’s Human Products - literal reverse farming game, where you’re chickens harvesting humans of different body proportions (and using the extra chonky ones as pets, since in the in-game world they’re apparently cute), it’s dark as hell. I also laughed aloud and am still grinning when I think of this. 11/10 for the inversion of expectations
• Happy Bastards - in the style of Battle Brothers but with a comic turn in that you’re a powergrubbing merc who just uses the other mercs and steals their accomplishments as renown, i.e. a bastard. The combat demo is cool but what I’m looking forward to is the map portion to see what the RNG events will be like (the visual style is also on point for something like this, got that Cartoon Network quality)

How do you feel about comedy in games in general - is there too much of it (too much of the bad kind) or too little of it? I feel there’s too little of the darker variety of humor specifically, but that could be just my impression - enlighten me if you know of any more good darkfunny games that came out in recent years