Trover Saves the Universe

Trover Saves the Universe is a third-person comedy action-adventure from Squanch Games, the studio founded by Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty fame. You play as a chairorpian - a being who exists in a hoverchair - and you guide Trover, a small purple creature with stolen dogs jammed into his eye sockets, through a string of surreal alien worlds. The core loop is simple: move Trover around to attack enemies, solve light environmental puzzles, and collect power babies to restore his strength. The gameplay itself is deliberately uncomplicated. This is not a game that wants to challenge your reflexes. It wants to make you laugh until something comes out of your nose. What actually makes it work is the writing. Roiland voices Trover himself, and the improvisational, often rambling delivery is the whole engine of the experience. Trover will stop mid-fight to question the logic of the universe, break the fourth wall in ways that feel earned rather than lazy, and occasionally just yell for an extended period. The humor is crude, absurdist, and relentlessly self-aware. It will absolutely not land for everyone. If Roiland's style grates on you in small doses, six-plus hours of it will feel like a lot. But if you are already a fan of that specific flavor of chaotic improv comedy, this is probably the densest delivery system for it outside of the show itself. The game was designed with VR in mind - the hoverchair framing exists so that your viewpoint stays stationary while Trover moves, which reduces motion sickness. Playing flat on a monitor still works fine, though some of the spatial comedy and the sense of scale across alien environments loses a little something without the headset. The worlds themselves are colorful and weird in a low-poly, cartoonish way that suits the tone perfectly. Nobody is going to cite this as a technical showcase, but the art direction is coherent and consistently committed to its own strange logic. The length is worth noting because it is genuinely part of the design. The game is short, it knows it is short, and it ends before it exhausts itself. There are branching dialogue options, hidden collectibles, and a handful of alternate endings that reward a second run without padding the first. For a narrative comedy game, this kind of self-awareness about pacing is rarer than it should be. A six-to-eight hour experience with a clean finish line is worth more than a twenty-hour one that forgets what it was doing by hour twelve. The main limitations are real though. Combat is shallow enough that the phrase "combat" barely applies. Puzzle complexity tops out early. If you come to this expecting a substantial action game, you will be disappointed. This is essentially an interactive comedy special with light platforming connective tissue. Judge it on those terms and it holds up well. Judge it as an action-adventure and it will feel thin.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Trover Saves the Universe.