The Procession to Calvary

My first reaction when I loaded this up was something between a laugh and a squint, because the opening screen looks like a Bruegel painting had a collision with a Monty Python sketch reel, and somehow that collision was intentional and controlled. Joe Richardson made this alone, collaging works by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Michelangelo and dozens of other masters into a single, surprisingly coherent world, then animated the whole thing with a cheerful disregard for dignity. The result is unlike anything else on your wishlist. You play as a warrior-queen lifted straight from Rembrandt's Bellona, dispatched to hunt down a religious leader named Heavenly Peter after a holy war conveniently ends before she can finish enjoying it. The quest takes you through scenes populated by peasants, gondoliers, demons, anthropomorphic animals, and at least one highly practical skunk. Mechanically it is a traditional point-and-click: a verb-coin interaction menu, a drag-and-drop inventory, dialogue trees that drop clues if you bother to read them. Puzzles are generally fair, with solutions that obey a consistent internal logic even when the logic is absurd. The game also hands you a sword button. Using it on people is strongly discouraged by the game itself, right before it lets you do it anyway. Stabbing your way through a puzzle skips it entirely, but accumulates consequences that snowball toward one of several worse endings. That tension between the efficient-violent path and the properly-solved path gives the short runtime surprising replayability. The comedy is the whole point, and Richardson earns it. The humour sits in that particular register where crudeness and wit operate simultaneously, closer to actual Python than most games that invoke the name. Butt jokes are delivered with the same deadpan commitment as the theological satire. Some gags are pure outtake material, a little too derivative to land, but those are outnumbered. The soundtrack compounds the tonal joke perfectly: public-domain classical pieces by Vivaldi, Bach and Handel play sincerely under scenes of complete chaos, and the gap between the music's gravity and what is happening on screen is its own running gag. The honest limitation here is length. A careful first run through all the puzzles tops out at a few hours. A sword-happy speed-run can end in around fifteen minutes, in crucifixion. Players who need bulk will not find it. What they will find, and this matters, is a game that knows exactly what it is and does not overstay its welcome by a single scene. There is an in-game art gallery where you can view the original paintings used for every character and location, which is a small, generous touch that rewards anyone who cares about the craft behind the collage. The game is also a standalone story, so no prior knowledge of Four Last Things is required, though fans of that predecessor tend to rate this one higher.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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