In fact, the most-dropped items in my playthrough were easily money and food, followed by potions and spells. The feeling that you’re playing an RPG is very strong, even though the character development is relatively light: there’s no skill tree, but each time you level up, you’ll get to choose one of three semi-randomly selected “hero cards,” each of which upgrades one of six attributes like melee damage, ranged damage, and money dropped by enemies.Īs you fight your way toward The Artifact, you’ll try out quite a few weapons and pieces of armor, although this game isn’t as loot-heavy as many action RPGs. I used them to solve a few quests (“just to check it out for my review,” of course), but still ended the game with at least 20 cookies to my name. If you do get in trouble, the game includes a hint system whereby you can get a few increasingly pointed clues for each quest by opening one of a limited number of fortune cookies. There are some puzzles that don’t involve hitting or fetching, and they’re mostly good and not brain-bustingly difficult to solve. It could also be described as one of the few hack & slash games that actually makes a point of having a plot and characters (and I mean that as a compliment). Hothead describes Deathspank as an action RPG/adventure game, and that’s fair. The importance of this will be obvious to anyone who lives with a significant other. I’ll mention this again in a bit, but I played through most of the game with my wife, Amy, who felt the same way. The dialogue is well written, and although there’s a certain amount of self-referential humor and a few pop culture references, it never falls into the pit of “trying too hard.” I went into the experience having seen many references to the game’s scatological jokes, but I didn’t feel like it went too far with them and I’m not a fan of gross-out humor. If you’ve played the Monkey Island games, you’ll know that Ron Gilbert is known for his games containing a lot of humor, and Deathspank doesn’t disappoint. All of the sidequests are optional, but their rewards in both fun and experience points make them very worth completing.Īnd, thank goodness, they’re funny too. And that’s really what the main story seems to be there for: to drive you to the places where you can find more sidequests. He seems to immediately trust the motivation of everyone he deals with, which leads to a number of fun, but clearly “evil” sidequests throughout the game.
You see, he’s a mighty helpful guy, as long as you’re the one who asked him for help. There’s never any mention of why The Artifact is important or what it does, but that is fine by Deathspank. As the game begins, he is nearing the end of a quest to retrieve “The Artifact,” because someone asked him to.
This game is named after its star, the hero warrior Deathspank, who spends his days trying to do good for everyone around him. The quest for The MacGuffin… er, Artifact. And when I finally got to play it, I knew that they had reason to be proud. They clearly cared a lot about what they were doing and were releasing a product they felt proud of. However, when I spoke with them a few weeks before release about what they were delivering and how they’d approached the game, my spirits were lifted immensely. Hothead Games’ only previous release, Penny Arcade Adventures, wasn’t bad, but the “sophomore slump” could have meant frightening things for Deathspank. When I heard that Deathspank was the brainchild of Ron Gilbert, one of the legendary designers of the point-and-click adventure game world, I was both excited and scared.
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