In a park outside of a Soviet consulate, you sidle up to a man in a trench coat and a fedora. He offers you a stick of gum. You accept, chewing the gum and blowing a respectably large bubble. However, things take a turn for the worse when the bubble bursts and blinds the man in the trench-coat, who then steps onto a rake, which hits him in the face and catapults him into a nearby road where he gets hit by several cars. In Jazzpunk, this is just an average NPC interaction.

Jazzpunk is a first-person comedy adventure game available now on Steam about an espionage agent named Polyblank who is sent on a series of bizarre missions by his director, whose secret office is based in Darlington station. The noir-inspired world of Jazzpunk is inhabited by people who look like the little men and women on toilet doors, and who communicate in strange, lo-fi voices as if the voice actors were stood a little too close to the microphone.

It all combines to create an adventure that is as surreal as it is painfully funny. Like the first part of it’s title, Jazzpunk’s delivery is reminiscent of free-form jazz, with things happening without much relevance or context. The player clings desperately on to the single thread of logic that runs through-out game, only to realise that it’s not a thread at all, but a string of comedy sausages attached to a raging goat.

In terms of the ‘main mission’, Jazzpunk could be completed in about fifteen minutes, but it’s not the sort of game you plough through without soaking up the finer details. My normal practice was to completely ignore the objectives until I’d combed every inch of the levels for laughs, and there are plenty to find. The missions tend to be as nonsensical as their delivery. Through-out the game, the player has to poison a cowboy’s sushi, beat a robotic pig to death with a guitar and much, much more.

It’s not a game that seeks to challenge its player, so anybody looking for brain-teasing puzzles will be dissapointed. One puzzle involves the player photocopying their backside to somehow bypass a facial recognition scanner. It’s hardly Beyond a Steel Sky. If it had have been difficult, it would have detracted from the game’s main aim, which is to make you laugh. It’s a comedy game, through and through. The gameplay is there to provide a stage for its multitude of jokes.

As a comedy game, it cannot be faulted. I have never laughed so much and so consistently at a video game. It matches Airplane! in terms of relentless, hilarious gags, despite how silly they might be. It may only be short, with a humble two or three hour runtime, but it’s all the better for its brevity. Like a well-timed joke, it comes and goes, and fortunately it’s reasonably priced. It’s short length also helps negate another of its issues. Jazzpunk is a game completely without focus. The plot is merely a formality, and at times it can feel like you’re wandering around the levels pressing stuff with no motivation other than to be amused, but couldn’t that be said of all video games?

I can confidently say that Jazzpunk is the funniest game I have ever had the pleasure to play, and if you’ve got any sense of humour at all, particularly if you like Monty Python-esque humour, you should play it too. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of human being who complains at the slightest inaccuracies in Euro Truck Simulator, it’s probably not for you.

8/10

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