Precipice is the first part (part one) in a four-part series, entitled Penny Arcade Adventures, and it’s based on characters and themes from the popular comic of approximate name. It’s a love letter to gaming, and it’s a love letter to the strip, which will confuse and repulse some, but enchant most.

New Arcadia is brought to its knees by four-foot, fruit-fucking automatons and feral hobo-kind, and it’s up to Gabe, Tycho, and you (!) to stop the absurd onslaught. Almost every element of the game, from the hobos to the dubious placement of poo, has undergone some form of meditative, one-sided conversation in the thousands of years that Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik have been writing the tri-weekly web comic. Their brazen style of humour will shock naked eyes. Even as a gamer, and even as a fan of Penny Arcade, I didn’t anticipate the level of free-floating vulgarity. But the waters warmed quickly, (probably from the pee [there's a lot of pee in this game]) and with them did my heart.

I actually thought the game was pretty ugly at first, (I played it on a mac) but cranking the resolution soon revealed the crisp, saturated world for what it really was. Translating 3D characters into a 2D-like style is just now becoming acceptable, but to do the opposite brings on all new challenges that are not regularly met. Precipice makes a point of showing you how flawlessly Krahulik’s art can become a 3D model by, in some cases, transitioning straight from one form to the other. I found that once I got accustomed to them I didn’t even notice the transitions, and the lines bled even more.

A large portion of my play time was spent actually doing things, (clicking, smashing boxes, getting my junk gnawed on by clowns) which was pleasing. You can smell the various RPGs that inspired the game’s battle system, which is extremely Japanese traditional. The system lives in such a refined state, though, that it seems almost new. Each party member has three timers, representing item, attack, and special. When the first timer maxes, the second timer begins, and so on. If two or all three characters max all of their timers, they can dispense a combo. There are also secondary character timers that act like summons, which are useful as damage-dealing moves for the first three fourths of the game, but they can also act as time bonuses, allowing your main party to get their specials while the cat licks itself.

There’s rarely a moment in the combat where you’re not selecting something, and what results (for mouse-users anyway) is mild frustration. You have to click the move you’d like to preform, then, in the event of a special attack, you have to select which special you’d like to use, and then you can select the enemy you’d like to use it on. It wouldn’t be so bad if the characters weren’t zig-zagging on the screen some times, so your mouse click misses occasionally, forcing you to begin the process from stage one. This entire deal would be a non-issue if you were able to map the controls to a controller or the keyboard, but you can’t. In fact, there are no control options at all. It’s a small issue in most respects, but I can see whole seconds lost during combat hanging over my head like a fourth-dimential scar I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

There’s also a small collection of mini-games that look like they were made in flash and feel just as cumbersome. You don’t have to spend much time with them, thankfully, and by no means is it the greatest crime a game has ever committed, but much like the golden saucer in Final Fantasy VII, these janky little things are unwanted, at least by me.

When the chips are down, Precipice is a six hour comic strip wearing RPG groucho glasses. You can look at the game in many different ways, most of which will leave a sweet taste in your mouth and a salty freshness in the air around you, but if it’s solid narrative and quality words you’re looking for, pound for pound, this game rolls with the big boys.