Strong Bad may have seemed like an unlikely choice for an adventure game protagonist (he’s not quite a hero, but we’re still cheering the jerk on because he’s hilarious), yet it worked. Over the last four episodes we’ve guided him through causing general mayhem and misery, a popular uprising, a metal concert, and a really cheesy action movie. It seems only fitting that the end to this season of Strong Bad games ends on a high note, serving as both a solid point and click adventure and an amusing commentary on the history of video games.
Like most episodes, the premise for this one is unapologetically ridiculous: Strong Bad has damaged his Trogdor arcade cabinet (the one that has sat idle in the last four episodes), and his botched repairs cause a merger between the normal world and that of video games. At first he has no intention of doing anything about that and likes the mayhem it’s causing, but when problems mount Strong Bad is convinced to set things right. It would be fair to say that the gameplay is ’more of the same’, involving talking to various characters and solving puzzles, but the whole way through you get a rather satirical look at everything from the early days of gaming, to modern indie titles.
The folks at Telltale pulled out all the stops here, with almost every topic being covered in some way. Early PC game copy protection, the repetitive visuals of some of the original first person shooters, and even some jokes about load-bearing bosses are all fair game. This is joined by graphics that successfully portray almost every era of gaming, from the blocky pixels of the Atari 2600 to early uses of polygons. Even the music matches these themes, never a direct copy of any one song but nonetheless capturing the feel of old-school gaming. It’s obvious the folks involved with this episode knew their stuff, and while some topics rightly get outright mocked (such as just how needlessly brutal the old King’s Quest games were), others receive something more like affectionate parodies.
The only real problem at all is that a few puzzles are just plain confusing, the sort that I never would have solved without a little help. But beyond those, this is a decent adventure game and should last you somewhere around three hours; more if you go searching for secrets, which I highly recommend this time around. This is the last episode in the current series of Strong Bad games, and it succeeds in every way: It is a good adventure title, a fitting end to the series/season, and a surprisingly thorough history and parody of the history of video games.
