I found myself laughing at bits far and few between. This game's humor falls back into SouthPark-esque political relativism and stays entirely reactionary in it's comedy.
To point a finger towards a bad style of leading is all good and fun, until, a few cutscenes later you realize all these jokes lack any political substance. This game just goes: "Look, they're doing it poorly", without actually criticizing why a certain thing is done the way it's done or who it might benefit. The two candidates for example where portrayed as having absolutely no reason to want to stay in power outside of power being the end in itself. This is such a liberal observation and surface-level joke, that showcases how little analysis of power-relations and the reason behind them, went into creating this bit. Sadly, this is how a lot of the topics and themes this game dances around were handled.
I found myself laughing at the revolutionaries at first, but fell off the joke halfway through, where I realized that too was a very surface level view on leftism as a whole, with no intention of interrogating how they ended up on the beach as they were. Joe had comedy-gold laying at his feet and then decided to just go for making the point that leftism, revolutionaries are impotent to change anything and are just complacent.
Neither did I feel offended, nor did I see any even half smart observation being made here. If this really wants to be a satiric game, it failed for me in that regard. Because that is a problem I see with most of the actual jokes being made. This game too references Monkey Island quite heavily in parts and although MI's setting is not nearly as close to the modern and current world, as this one is, it makes so many smarter and overall just more great observation about politics, bureaucracy and discourse-culture than this game does.
My last point on this game specifically, but also on the two works of Joe Richardson I played so far:
1. This is the second out of three games (so far and only that I know of) if Richardson, where you use a woman towards your own means. That just rubs me the wrong way. In Four Last Things it was literally to have sex with a woman for a quest, without her having any meaningful dialogue. The only means of interacting with her in that game was to look through the window that had Peep here! written above it, and later handing her a piece of poetry to trick her into thinking the protagonist wrote it.
In this game, you take a picture of the naked chest of Helen, to hand it to the guy writing the newspaper on the island. Later you use her AGAIN, because you need a famous person behind you, while holding a political speech, in order to gain more votes. I could read some commentary in the latter, and am not against devs making you do horrible stuff in videogames in order to send a message, but these two were nearly unaccompanied by anything substantial or adressed ever after they happen and so I have to take them as very flat jokes, played only for laughs.
Overall this game just screamed 2016 at me and I felt that from playing Four Last Things, I have a pretty good guess at what The Procession to Cavalry could be. I can't deny, that what Richardson achieved here, is definitely an intriguing body of work, that I'm willing to engage with a little more. It feels like Four Last Things was an answer to this game in some sense. Many of the frameworks loosely resemble each other (getting the documents e.g.) and overall the newer one improves many of them over this game. I'm intrigued what the next two games have in store.
2/3 of my reviews on Joe Richardson's body of work
To point a finger towards a bad style of leading is all good and fun, until, a few cutscenes later you realize all these jokes lack any political substance. This game just goes: "Look, they're doing it poorly", without actually criticizing why a certain thing is done the way it's done or who it might benefit. The two candidates for example where portrayed as having absolutely no reason to want to stay in power outside of power being the end in itself. This is such a liberal observation and surface-level joke, that showcases how little analysis of power-relations and the reason behind them, went into creating this bit. Sadly, this is how a lot of the topics and themes this game dances around were handled.
I found myself laughing at the revolutionaries at first, but fell off the joke halfway through, where I realized that too was a very surface level view on leftism as a whole, with no intention of interrogating how they ended up on the beach as they were. Joe had comedy-gold laying at his feet and then decided to just go for making the point that leftism, revolutionaries are impotent to change anything and are just complacent.
Neither did I feel offended, nor did I see any even half smart observation being made here. If this really wants to be a satiric game, it failed for me in that regard. Because that is a problem I see with most of the actual jokes being made. This game too references Monkey Island quite heavily in parts and although MI's setting is not nearly as close to the modern and current world, as this one is, it makes so many smarter and overall just more great observation about politics, bureaucracy and discourse-culture than this game does.
My last point on this game specifically, but also on the two works of Joe Richardson I played so far:
1. This is the second out of three games (so far and only that I know of) if Richardson, where you use a woman towards your own means. That just rubs me the wrong way. In Four Last Things it was literally to have sex with a woman for a quest, without her having any meaningful dialogue. The only means of interacting with her in that game was to look through the window that had Peep here! written above it, and later handing her a piece of poetry to trick her into thinking the protagonist wrote it.
In this game, you take a picture of the naked chest of Helen, to hand it to the guy writing the newspaper on the island. Later you use her AGAIN, because you need a famous person behind you, while holding a political speech, in order to gain more votes. I could read some commentary in the latter, and am not against devs making you do horrible stuff in videogames in order to send a message, but these two were nearly unaccompanied by anything substantial or adressed ever after they happen and so I have to take them as very flat jokes, played only for laughs.
Overall this game just screamed 2016 at me and I felt that from playing Four Last Things, I have a pretty good guess at what The Procession to Cavalry could be. I can't deny, that what Richardson achieved here, is definitely an intriguing body of work, that I'm willing to engage with a little more. It feels like Four Last Things was an answer to this game in some sense. Many of the frameworks loosely resemble each other (getting the documents e.g.) and overall the newer one improves many of them over this game. I'm intrigued what the next two games have in store.
2/3 of my reviews on Joe Richardson's body of work