Pleasing and Practical, Volume 2: Silly Adventures Across Genres

Games with ridiculous premises are worth your time.

Jeff, as The Dean: Welcome to Dean-dale Community Colle-dean. I’m a silly goose. Honk, honk. Dean-a-lee-do. Look at me. This is my sister’s outfit!

The Dean, directing: Stop! Jeffrey, stop! You’ve hit gold. Save some for the screen.

Community, “Documentary Filmmaking: Redux”

I made this in MS Paint. All other images are official cover art. Is it still “cover art” if it’s digital and there’s no cover?

If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Evan Moore; I’m a scholar of medieval literature and videogames. Today I’m talking about less-serious and low-stakes stuff. Main takeaway: buy into whatever works for you, have fun, and find interesting analysis wherever you are.

In this piece, I’m going to highlight some games with narratives or conceits that are silly all the way through and yet held my attention in earnest. I believe that things can be serious and silly at the same time; humor and playfulness do not detract from sincerity.

Intro: Games have always been silly

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where games come from, what they provide for us, and how we can best approach leisure in games that demand action from us.

Games are not really supposed to have firm, unchanging narratives. We put storytelling onto them because we realized just how good they are at getting the player to feel what the character feels. Games are supposed to be goofy titles you mess around with when you want to do something but not really work.

This is probably odd to read from me, a literature guy who loves linear story games. But it’s important to consider that, as film emerged from photography, videogames emerged from softwares, databases, and eventually arcades. Not books. Games are for poking a computer and seeing what happens. These days, the thing that happens is sometimes the most moving, evocative story you’ve ever encountered (looking at Clair Obscur, God of War, and Ghost of Tsushima as a start)—but they do not need to be; that’s not what makes them games.

The earliest videogames are either textually-unimportant and transitory experiences, as we know in our times in an arcade, or they are single-player adaptations from tabletop roleplaying games.¹ Colossal Cave Adventure (1970s) is not really fun because you get a cool adventure story about a spelunker in Kentucky. It’s fun because you the player have to parse out your options with the software, with its database of possible actions and events. The story you get to tell is your own story about your playing. The play is at the center, and the play is, on its own, pretty silly. You need good humor to engage with it.

(Play CCA for yourself at this link. It’s still cool!)

The key idea I’m getting at here is emergent narrative.² When we’re playing, it’s best to remember that we’re supposed to be playing. Let the playing tell the story, and let that story be different every time you play. If you enjoy the gameplay loop, then it works. And, as often as not, a silly premise, an irreverent tone, or just inclusion of humor are enough to get me to enjoy it.

Donkey Kong and Mrs. Pac-Man are really, really dumb. That’s why we love them. Games that don’t take themselves seriously and admit that they’re just stupid games are absolutely still interesting to talk about and fun to play.

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Here are a few of my favorites from the last couple years that revel in their unserious conceits. What’s your favorite silly game?

Duck Detective

I just finished playing Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (2023). I’ll play the sequel soon. It’s very dumb, but its absolute commitment to the bit was impressive. You play as a duck—the duck detective—who is the most “detective” someone can be: sad, lonely, congratulates himself, beer gut, has a journal. Someone at a small office stole someone else’s sandwich, and you need to find the culprit: the Salami Bandit.

Everyone in the game is a 2D cut-out, with no variation. The animation is a flat image moving across an isometric space. Super simple. Breaks immersion as much as possible. Hilarious to watch.

The voice acting is incredible. They even got Brian David Gilbert to come in for one of the roles. The voices alone sell the game. I cannot believe these people delivered their lines so earnestly. You can tell the actors and the developers had a blast making this game. It’s irreverent, the humor lands, the case both means nothing and has a ton of real implications, and you can feel the puzzle setting, as clever and smooth as it is.

It’s a stupid game. Nothing in it should work. It does not ask to be taken seriously, and there are many, many more serious, sophisticated, and interesting puzzle games out there. Duck Detective interests me right now, though, because it was incredibly fun and, crucially, it did not ask very much of me. The solves weren’t too difficult, and the narrative moved easily enough. It felt easy to play, agreeable to think about.

Duck Detective does take the player to a pretty important spot: in the end, you choose which of the conspiracy members to arrest. 90% of players have chosen the manager (at the time of writing). There’s some interesting stuff about work culture, time off, benefits, why people resort to crime, and personal forgiveness—but all that is overshadowed by the fact that you’re a duck, and the game refuses to go a couple minutes without some gag or one-liner (including the loading screens).

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Garden Story

Garden Story (2021) has a slightly more serious tone and more serious themes (it deals with grief, decay, and growing up), but those are easy to deal with because the main character is an adorable grape named Concord.

Concord has come of age, and he needs to help protect the Grove from the oncoming Rot, the little monsters of the game. Gameplay and aesthetics are largely oldschool zelda-like with some metroidvania and RPG influence: talk to people, explore areas, help the people around you, walk around, fight the Rot, upgrade your weapons, eventually beat a few bosses, walk around some more.

The game includes a time-cycle—Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night—and Concord gets requests every morning to help the people of the different towns he lives in. Fulfilling the requests before you sleep (Night is indefinite; it ends when you sleep) gives you more resources but also improves the town, giving Concord access to more things. Plus, you really get to feel like you’re helping.

It’s a really fun game on its own, and its dealings with heavy themes are commendable. The silly premise (you’re a grape that does chores) actually helps the game’s messages.

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Turnip Boy

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (2021) is all cringe. The humor is painfully millennial. It works for me when I’m in the mood. It’s a classic zelda-like action-adventure, and it’s short.

Like Garden Story, the premise itself is pretty dumb: you play as a turnip who rips up his tax bill and now owes the mayor service in return (that’s right, it’s debt peonage baybyyy). Like Duck Detective, the playing itself is silly until the stakes massively increase: the journey takes Turnip Boy through radioactive waste, a ruined old world filled with newly-sentient vegetables, and our realization that this is our future, in which humans nuked each other and left uranium-borne plants to inherit the earth.

Which, despite its serious and dire implications, is still silly as hell. Sentient vegetables with some apocalyptic lore is made for me.

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Lightning round

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002) stars the horniest raccoon, the hottest fox-cop, and the least serious enemies ever.

Ratchet and Clank (all of them, honestly) is like that “this hole was made for me” meme. Unserious sci-fi rocks.

This one is my favorite version.

Grim Fandango (1998) and Crypt Custodian (2024) both have super silly premises and great humor throughout, though they feature some serious themes.

The Outer Worlds (2019) is also ridiculous basically the whole time (one of the companion’s special attacks is a drop-kick).

And it wouldn’t be a list of mine without some Telltale games. They tend to include plenty of humor and some dumb situations, even The Walking Dead at times.

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So, what about you? What silly games do you love or come back to? Are they comforting for you?

Coming up soon, I’m going to take a look at labor in games (over the course of several articles), and, for “Pleasing and Practical” Volume 3, I’m going to add my two cents to the ongoing discourse about cozy games and genre. For now, be at peace.

1. Pac-Man is not really supposed to be analyzed for a narrative, right? It’s challenging, it’s fun to play, and when you lose you can try again. It’s a compact experience, meant to be retried and to provide a short escape with your friends. It has an emergent narrative—one of your play session. The vast majority of games on early consoles are games first and might provide a story second. This priority shifts within the adventure macro-genre slowly through the ‘90s and ‘00s, but even in the games without any mutability, the playing is still important. The most linear games, like Uncharted, still have a fundamentally ludic property; the puzzles and gun-play are part and parcel with the narrative. Gameplay is narrative (if you want more from me about that idea specifically, let me know!).

2. A narrative is “emergent” when it comes out of your play because of your play, not hard-coded into the game itself. See the TV Tropes page for more; I like their explanation a lot. It’s related to the idea of “ergodic” experiences which I discussed in Gaming 102.