I’m not quite sure when Jazzpunk grabbed me. What begins as a game with a striking 60’s art-style married with predictable - and often tedious - jokes (the very first gag has you sitting on a whoopee cushion, for God’s sake), eventually blossoms into the videogame equivalent of an LSD trip.
Billing itself as a comedy adventure, Necrophone Games’ debut is perhaps more accurately described as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. meets Austin Powers by way of Looney Tunes and The Matrix. Its published by Adult Swim, and if you’re at all familiar with the publisher’s previous output - everything from the TV series Robot Chicken to Robot Unicorn Attack on iOS - then you’ll have an idea of the sort of bizarre, off-the-wall experience you’re letting yourself in for.
Jazzpunk‘s Cold War setting sees you infiltrating Soviet strongholds or attempting to uncover threats to national security. While that might sound like the premise for any number of first-person shooters, Jazzpunk most definitely isn’t an FPS - and it’s anything but conventional. You’ll vomit Pigeon Milk in the face of a Sushi Chef, traipse through computer simulations or don a blonde wig and lipstick to seduce a target. The plot, such as it is, sees you playing as a secret agent named Polyblank, delivered through a mail slot into a secret government agency located underneath Japan. You have a handler, of sorts, who provides you with your objective for each mission, and you arrive in each level after taking medication called “Missionyl”.
What starts off as a surreal experience quickly becomes downright absurd and nonsensical. It’s clear as soon as you start playing that Necrophone threw all pretense of logic out of the window the moment they sat down to create the game. Nowhere is this more obvious than in some of the tasks you’re required to perform on your way to completing each mission. You’ll impersonate a woman to steal a briefcase in a holiday resort, cause a man to vomit himself into a state of unconsciousness in a sushi restaurant so you can steal his organs, and cut chunks out of zombies in a strange survival-horror minigame that’s part homage to The Evil Dead and part love-letter to takeaway pizza. There’s even a recreation of the Street Fighter 2 car-destroying bonus stage.
Interaction is simple - the game is played in first-person, there’s the standard WASD controls to move around, and you can pick up and use objects in your environment or interact with the various NPCs in each level. There’s little real skill required in playing it; there’s no real puzzles to be solved, and no shooting to be had - you simply move around each level and interact with whatever you come across - but Jazzpunk is more content with being an experience than an actual game. The main obstacle preventing you from making progress is usually a case of trying to figure out the game’s lack of logic: photocopy your ass to gain access to a hidden base, roast a mechanical pig on a spit to gain access to a matrix-like virtual environment - none of it makes any logical sense, but the rate at which the game changes things up rarely gives you a chance to question what you’re doing or why.
The jokes come a mile a minute and it’s unsurprisingly hit and miss. Jazzpunk is best when it eschews slapstick and opts for the self-referential: an optional sojourn into a Quake-inspired wedding-themed FPS (aptly named Wedding Qake) is a highlight, and speaking to many of the NPCs which litter each area throws up some bizarre quotes, more often than not completely unrelated to your situation. Fans of Terry Gilliam’s animated Monty Python sequences will definitely enjoy it, but it’s sheer weirdness is likely to put off as many fans as it accumulates. It’s not for everyone, but it’s still worth a few hours of your time.
Many might argue that with a run-time of just a few hours, Jazzpunk is a bit on the short side, and it is. But I can’t imagine it working if it were any longer. Jazzpunk works so well because it’s short. It’s a brief, bright, trip into insanity that you’ll come out of with at least a couple of dozen moments that stick in the mind; if it were any longer, the anarchic kitchen-sink approach to the game’s design would run the risk of wearing too thin.
Visually, the game is bright and bold throughout, while its approach to character design and animation could charitably be called “minimalist”. That’s certainly not a criticism, however - the almost abstract approach to rendering your surroundings only heightens the weirdness of the events which transpire. It’s reminiscent of Thirty Flights of Loving - and the creator of that game, Brendon Chung, is even thanked in the credits - so if you enjoyed that, then you’ll certainly enjoy Jazzpunk. In addition, Luis Hernandez’s soundtrack - recorded almost entirely using old-school traditional analog equipment - is wonderfully evocative of the 50s setting. If you’re a fan of Jazz you’ll love it - I just wish it was available for purchase so I could add it to my music library.
Necrophone Games’ debut isn’t a deep game, and as refreshing as its approach is to star with the sheer onslaught of jokes does starts to wear a bit thin towards the end. It’s also a shame that so much of the content is hidden out of sight, because it means that many players will come away from the experience feeling rather disappointed having never seen some of its best moments. Keep at it though, and you’ll find yourself appreciating the jokes which do work enough to keep you going through the occasions when the script has you rolling your eyes.
Jazzpunk isn’t great, and it’s not quite as clever as it seems to think it is, but it is a good palette-cleanser, standing out amidst an ocean of grey-brown shooters and over-wrought fantasy epics fixated with seriousness. It’s short, sharp, and to the point - even if often you’ll wonder exactly what that point is.
