Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Review

Penny Arcade's dabble into games has produced On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a mystery RPG where you get to run around parts of Arcadia with Tycho and Gabe. The game will pit you against mimes, robots, hobos, and clowns. This game is also rated M for Mature, and is so because of the blood, language, and dark humor.

To be honest I was beyond hyped about getting my hands on this game. I wanted it for the XBOX360 since I figured that it would feel natural on the system, and for the most part that's exactly what it was. There were a couple spots where I wanted to check something out which was on the edge of the screen and I accidentally advanced an area, or I was trying to interact with something and instead I ended up interacting with something else because it was so close together.

The thing that troubles me about this game is that this game is strictly meant for a HD setup. I cringed every time I had to read something, or I had to decipher what amount of certain items I had. The other thing that I kind of got to me about this game is that yes I understand language, and the that whole thing but sometimes it felt that the writer just wanted to throw random cuss words in just for the hell of it, and I think that actually degraded the experience. My final gripe is that I just laid out 20 bucks to play this game and I got three areas to adventure in, and one place to continuously go back to. I felt that just as I was finally starting to go with the flow it was credit time. I understand that it is episodic material and that there's more, but I wonder what the price tag for the second part will be.

Now for some of the good things. I liked the combat, even if I couldn't really make out much of the commands on the screen. You had to act fast as if you didn't your enemies were going to go after you. I wish that the counterattack move was a little bit crisper as I was able to time the button press a good portion of the time and sometimes I'd get the counterattack and other times I would get partial block. The way to execute the special moves I liked, it was interactive and didn't always promise that you'd be able to do full damage to your opponent (Though of course there were times where I was getting my ass handed to me that I wanted the attacks to just work themselves and save me the chance of messing up). The other thing was that you only had to make it through the combat and your characters were automatically healed, which was freaking sweet.

To be honest this game has potential and the series as a whole could really rock people's socks off, but I think that it really didn't end up shining as much as I would have liked and I felt that there were parts that could have been better. I love the comic and I thought the game was a good first try, but I have to give this game a 6.9 out of 10.

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