I will never forget the day my uncle told me about his neighbor’s cat, Malcolm. Partly because my family always manages to intrude into the conversation in one way or another whenever we get together, but mostly because Malcolm is indeed, by all accounts, a bit of a shit (pardon the expletive). Every day, he waltzed into my uncle’s cat flap, gobbled up the two batches of food he had put out for his own pair of scared cats, then turned around and walked right back out. Some stories sometimes involve him peeing on the carpet. Others, vomiting his guts.

I was reminded of Malcolm this week playing Joe Richardson’s latest adventure game, Death of the Reprobate, which is brought to life as a Renaissance painting. In this movie you also play a guy named Malcolm the Shit, and I think they would get along famously. Within seconds of starting, you see precisely how Malcolm earned his heinous suffix by inflicting all sorts of terrible punishments on petty criminals who dared to cross him. As they are transported to his throne room, the dialogue from Death of the Reprobate immediately sets the tone for what is to come, and when a messenger arrives saying that your father, John the Immortal, is not at the height of his name after all, trot off to visit him and hopefully claim your inheritance before he bursts his hooves.

But like father like son, old John knows what a stinking man Malcolm has become at court and asks him to perform seven good deeds before sunset to prove he is worthy of his earthly riches. “The Lord will guide you,” you are told ambiguously, which is probably appropriate, given the times and all, but then you go out and find “The Lord” literally standing in front of you in the bushes, holding a big sharp knife. sign above the head of your first unwitting prey. I guess the Lord works in mysterious ways after all it seems.

So begins your bizarre point-and-click odyssey to help seven local peasants in the nearby backwater, each needing their own unique cocktail of fetch quests and puzzle items to acquire before you can cross them off your bucket list to do and consider the act accomplished. . In other words, it’s a classic adventure game, albeit presented through the prism of comically repurposed real-life paintings, with characters, scenes, and landscapes all coming together to create a village of unbelievers surreal but still entertaining.

If you’ve played Richardson’s most recent work, The Procession to Calvary, you’ll know exactly what kind of nonsense you can expect here. But for those who haven’t yet, this is art like you’ve probably never seen before – think Kindly or Please Touch the artwork in the right way. naughtiest and most irreverent, then keep dialing it up to 11. Jauntily animated and armed with smart, modern jokes and barbs with which to chastise you, its marvelous hodgepodge of characters from all periods of the Renaissance, of the Baroque, the Classical and the Pre-Raphaelite have rarely been more lively or more pleasant to view and discuss with them.

Richardson has such a sense of wit and obviously stupid exchanges between these famous faces that each painting is a pure delight everywhere you look. Even through just a handful of playable scenes, it manages to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, from holy feuds and wealthy families besieged by their crowds of children, to drunks endlessly pissing into bottles in the local tavern while their friends bet on monkeys rolling dice in the corner. This always tends to lean towards the sleazier corners of that spectrum, but let’s face it, when hovering your mouse over a character reveals that their name is just “Creepy Fop” or “A Moaning Little Slap-Faced Brat,” only those with hearts of stone would be able to resist a secret chuckle. Music also contributes greatly, as each room, street and dwelling is accompanied by its own choir of chamber musicians who regale you with Mozart, Bach, Chopin and others. It’s really quite charming in the way it mixes low and high eyebrows like this, and it creates a powerful sense of place that permeates the game from start to finish.

In this absurd context, Malcolm must start doing good. He has three available actions he can perform on any interactive object: look, speak, and touch (although the latter usually results in a slap to some poor soul, or if he’s feeling particularly generous, a good little scratch on the head). You’ll need to use a combination of all three to work your way to victory, and many involve a good degree of creative thinking to get the right results – just wait until you get to the cow and bucket, that’s all I do. adage. If you get stuck, however, Death of the Reprobate doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to tips and tricks on how to proceed. A very honest mystic will tell you very clearly what you need to do next to help someone, and while I wish that wasn’t the case, enough so straightforward during these initial inquiries, there’s something to be said for how it respects your time and patience (although when you can see everything in just under three hours, speed isn’t really of the essence here either).

Admittedly, most of the time I was perplexed because I didn’t even realize I’d missed a vital clickable object, because due to the nature of its artfully constructed brushwork, it can sometimes be difficult to determine what is simply part of the clickable object. the background and what is not. I also started playing it on my Steam Deck, which forces you to use its slightly painful touchpad by default, and whose small screen makes it even harder to select small details like this. Switching to my desk made it much easier, if only because I had a real mouse and keyboard handy so I could press H or hold down the middle mouse button to highlight each interactive object in a given scene. However, this still didn’t solve all my problems, and one particular puzzle in the tavern had me repeatedly overlooking important clues because my eyes simply weren’t registering some very subtle character changes. I won’t lie, I felt like a dunce once I figured it out, but every once in a while the living painting aspect can work against its otherwise excellent puzzles.

My only other concern is that its storyline leans a little too much into today’s meme culture for my liking, and I wonder if it has the necessary elements to really stand the test of time down the road. There are times when we do FULLCLAPPINGHANDSEMOJI, for example, while others resort to text emoticons like 😛 and ;). Sure, they resonate now, but will they look as cute in five years? Ask me again in 2029 when my forty-something squeaky meter is well and truly in his element. But even here and now, some lines of dialogue can already be a little too meme-y, so if your tolerance for things like “Get rekt!” is quite weak, Reprobate probably isn’t the game for you.

Still, even if its dialogue isn’t always to your taste, Death of the Reprobate is such a winner almost everywhere else that it’s all the easier to forgive the few clicks. Its bawdy, playful quests are infectious and its cleverly constructed puzzles will leave you wishing there were more unfortunates in need of Malcolm’s help. In a time when you need a little laugh, Death of the Reprobate is probably one of the best cures in existence today, and – just like the anecdote about my uncle’s Malcolm the Cat – it’s easily one of the most memorable games I’ve played. all year round. Let the campaign to canonize Malcolm the Shit begin here, because it truly is heavenly.

A copy of Death of the Reprobate was provided for review by developer Joe Richardson.