Cyanide & Happiness Freakpocalypse is an utter void from which your time can never be recovered

Playing the Cyanide & Happiness game is like having a friend recount to you this one Cyanide & Happiness bit they really liked and refusing to just show you the video itself.

I’ve been playing a lot of games as I’ve started writing critically about them. Part of that process has involved beating a lot of games. I even started tracking which games I have beaten, starting last year, as if I’d never finished a single one. How many will I complete before I die? I don’t know. But I wish that this first episode of Cyanide & Happiness Freakpocalypse was not one of them.

Cyanide & Happiness is a funny brand. That’s what it’s built over the course of its sixteen-year run. Though I’m no staunch follower, I’d call myself a fan. My college roommate and I would reference the Adventures of Lunk cartoon regularly and one of the only two Kickstarter campaigns I’ve ever contributed to was for the Cyanide & Happiness branded board game Trial by Trolley (the other was Shenmue III…).

But never have I so quickly been disillusioned by a half-hearted piece of media as I was sitting down to play Freakpocalypse.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m a comedian. But what I can safely say is that whoever worked on the writing team for Freakpocalypse can’t make that claim either. Though the game’s first scene does seem somewhat promising with its absurd premise, this quickly gives way to a barrage of high school themed jokes and situations that feel played out even as you encounter them. A snarky and malicious prom king makes an appearance, as does a muscle-bound and hormone-addled jock character, both of whom act as foils for our admittedly purposefully uncharismatic protagonist. And that, I think, is one of my two major problems with the game.

Number one, it isn’t funny.

Number two, I don’t want to play as the character I’m being made to play as.

Don’t get me wrong, games can succeed with undesirable or outright unlikable protagonists. Just look at the uncomfortably emotionless JC Denton of Deus Ex or Shenmue’s Ryo Hazuki, who is clearly suffering from some kind of social-related condition. But the problem with Coop, the thoroughly unliked main character of Freakpocalypse, is that he is uncharismatic despite being written as a sarcastic hero ala Superbad or Juno. He falls flat both in terms of the actual words he speaks and how they are spoken—that is to say that Coop is written and performed poorly enough that any charm that could rise out of his been-done-before high school loser schtick is entirely absent. Coop’s performance is clearly meant to underline a neurotic yet funny protagonist like Woody Allen in 1979 but instead conveys a neurotic and personality-less little man that makes you want to move away from anything he’s ever been involved in—like Woody Allen in 2020.

And that lackluster performance extends to the entirety of the voice cast I managed to encounter before mercifully seeing the credits. This is most likely indicative of a poor job done by a voice director rather than the cast as a whole, but no matter who is to blame, the effect is the same: I feel like I’m watching a Cyanide & Happiness short after all of the primary voice actors of that series got into a bloody scuffle with the backup performers at a wrap party and all that was left was a handful of C-tier talent that hadn’t even been invited to that party in the first place.

There’s this other elephant in the room too that must be addressed: the business that comes with the game.

Like it or not, games are a business, and history and performance must be considered as context when new games release. Freakpocalyspe is not the first Cyanide & Happiness game, nor is it a complete one. That honor goes to a game called Rapture Rejects, which appears to have been some kind of isometric battle royale also-ran that I cannot source my own material on because it is no longer available for purchase on Steam. Despite entering early access in 2018 with a projected release in 2020, the game just disappeared from the storefront altogether with, as far as I can tell, no announcement or explanation.

2018 must have been a bad year for the brand as that was the original release window for Freakpocalypse, which was delayed into 2019 and then 2020, not releasing until this year—which is quite a bit later. However, despite my references earlier, this is not Cyanide & Happiness: Freakpocalypse. It is Cyanide & Happiness Freakpocalypse: Episode One. And, if you’ll look, the last news post about the game is announcing Mac and Linux support. In June. Almost six months ago at the time of this writing. So what the hell is this thing? Will it ever be finished or will Explosm just decide that this one isn’t working out either and pull the plug, hoping we’ll all forget about it?

Let me tell you something: I will forget about Cyanide & Happiness: Freakpocalypse. I’ll forget about it within the next day or so. Because here’s the thing: Freakpocalypse is not a bad game. A bad game is one that is mechanically unsound or narratively disjointed. A bad game is something like Indigo Prophecy—it can be objectively bad but still hold value in experiencing it through some interesting idea or another. Even a notoriously “bad” game like Two Worlds carries some value because experiencing it allows one to be part of the zeitgeist it creates. I’ve only played Two Worlds because Adam Sessler once mocked it at length on broadcast television, a setup I must assume a decent percentage of the game’s players post-2007 must be familiar with.

Freakpocalypse is not a bad game. It is nothing.

It is the worst thing a game can be: a complete and utter waste of your time. What is here is paper thin and not even of a low enough quality to be interesting. Freakpocalypse is the kind of game you could 100% in an evening, if you could manage to stomach what it thinks is comedy in the vein of The Secret of Monkey Island but instead is a comedy in the same way Shenmue is a comedy. It isn’t. Only, to Shenmue’s credit, it isn’t trying to be.

I thoroughly wish that after playing Cyanide & Happiness Freakpocalypse I could believe it competently tried to be anything.