If you need me, I’ll be in the podcast cellar.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket this week! Today we’re talking about Jazzpunk, an unorthodox adventure game from 2014. When I say unorthodox, what you do in the game from a base mechanical level is pretty normal, moving around and interacting with objects and your inventory to solve puzzles and progress, but the logic of the game and the scenarios you play through are all pretty surreal and feel designed around the question “why not.” The game isn’t too hard to wrap your head around though; the scenes themselves are bizarre, not the puzzles’ requirements. The result is a game that is genuinely funny at times, with lots of one off interactable gags and minigames that you can get through pretty smoothly, with enough content you will probably miss to make each playthrough a little bit different. We’re going to be talking about why it is that jokes landed sometimes and not others, the aesthetics and world design that feels so varied from level to level, and the number of Wilhelm screams one is allotted in any particular work.
Thank you for listening to NOCLIP Pocket again this week! If you hadn’t surmised, yesterday’s fast food centric episode was an April Fools gag, but honestly this game could have fared fine as an April Fools Day episode itself. It was a weird little experience to play through, and one I wish I had actually played closer to when it came out. Comedy ages in weird ways sometimes, and something felt a bit dated about some of these jokes, though the overall vibe is still pretty good. What did you think? Did Jazzpunk hit the right notes for you or is it a bit too aggressively strange? Let us know over in the Discord or in the comments below! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Perfect Tides, which is a point and click game, so we hope you’ll join us for something very much in our usual wheelhouse.