Space Funeral

3:51 - I download and install Space Funeral.

3:58 - I start the game. All three main menu options have been replaced with the word "Blood". Lol. I choose the bottom one just to make sure it still quits.

4:05 - I start the game again. We are dumped right onto the first map, a grotesque version of the "hero's house" that many games start with. No introductory cinematic at all. Mom says "Eat your greens." The coffin functions as a "rest point". Why is my guy all ready shown lying in the coffin when I'm walking around? The opening strains of White Waking sound a little demented. Sets the mood perfectly.

4:07 - The starting "village" looks like, well ...

When I walk around, my guy claps his jaw and flails his arms. This isn't a joke game, is it?

4:09 - Oh no, a "battle school" area. I bet this game has a hundred tricks and rules that I'm expected to memorize. Some guy tells me about going to a "perfect city" but first I have to find a "blood cavern" blah blah blah, well, at least they don't beat around the bush in terms of laying out my tasks in this game.

4:11 - White Waking continues in the swamp area. It's starting to get to me. It's a pretty crappy swamp too. But I don't think I'm supposed to take this game seriously. There are no battle backgrounds.

4:16 - The first boss! It's a dragon! Have I prepared sufficiently!? Well, I kill it with autobattle, so I guess so.

4:23 - I get my next party member! It's a "leg horse". Picture what that might be, literally, and you're probably right. Perfectly effed up, as suits a game like this I suppose.

4:30 - The Blood Cavern is a red-on-black hellhole with a macabre poetry reading for music.

I'm actually quite amused now just because the attitude of pointlessness and despair has become so over-the-top and ridiculous. I don't let the wizard drink my blood -- later during a replay I will discover that I narrowly avoided a game over here. The appearance of the blood monster is actually pretty scary.

4:40 - We're at the next town. Monsters coming up from the mines, blah blah blah. A random NPC says "Would you like to see a pyramid?" and teleports you to a pyramid. I'm thinking about how when writing for an RPG you're supposed to try your best to build up a sense of urgency and momentousness. You're supposed to try your very, very best.


4:57 - I kill the next boss in one turn by lucking out with the "Mystery" battle command.

5:14 - I decide to play Mass Effect for a while.

8:05 - I get tired of Mass Effect and decide to play Space Funeral some more.

8:10 - From now on, I'm trying to avoid all combat, since I suspect that there's no point in grinding for experience. So far all battles have been pointlessly easy.


8:20 - Dracula's house turns out to be just a pointless joke area, like most of this game.

8:26 - I have a headache, probably from too many video games today. Then I get to the final area, the "City of Forms", and it looks like this:

Oh God, my head.

8:30 - The final boss battle begins. I autobattle it.

8:31 - The final boss battle ends. There's a twist ending.

Space Funeral is definitely a joke game, through and through. It's not very long, and the attitude of fatalism and apathy is genuinely funny in many places. The fact that the graphics are 100% custom is a plus, crude as they might be. It's good for some lols when you're bored. The fact that the game is laughably easy is also a plus, since a game like this can't expect much from the player. You can probably avoid as many battles as possible, since there's no point in leveling up, and don't bother buying equipment or managing your inventory. All that stuff in the "training room" about using Moral techniques and using certain items on certain kinds of enemies just doesn't matter. The best strategy is to just get smashed on Kahlua rum and breeze through it. It's probably the way this game was meant to me played.

Final Thought: I decided to try this game because of the Feature and the Paste Magazine article. Honestly, I suspect that its inclusion in the top 20 list was facetious, or else the author of the article hasn't seen enough of RPG Maker to recognize a joke game. But then, all top-20 lists are based on arbitrary personal preferences anyway.

Auxillary Final Thought: I thought it was going to be set in space.

My rating: 2 / 5