Playing A Game Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 PC

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 takes some admirable risks in re-mixing the formula from part 3 -- with uneven, but undeniably interesting, results.

The most immediately-apparent change is that we're Pokémon, now. Part 4 replaces its predecessors' class-customization system with "monstorb" monsters, such that your party is made up of little dudes like "Brodent" or "Philosofly" who each have their own advantages and skills (as well as abilities imparted by their assigned Trainer).

There are more than a dozen of these monsters in Rain-Slick 4, so the total spread of unique abilities is rather large; and while it's great to see comic references like Twisp and Catsby in this format, many of the monsters feel significantly less creative.

Despite an embarrassment of options for active monsters, assigned Trainers, and equipped weapon types, most of those options don't feel powerful or poignant. Rain-Slick 3 already had quite a few "dud" classes and abilities, and it definitely feels like the fourth game's monster inventory has tipped that quantity-over-quality balance even farther.

However! On the other side of combat, the enemy monster side, Rain-Slick 4 re-balances in a much more positive direction. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but compared to last time - when I complained about "too much combat" - I felt like these encounters were generally fewer, and more distinctively varied. Fights shifted frequently between small and large numbers, slow and fast opponents, healers and debuffers and one-hit-killers ... (With the notable exception of Chapter 9, which had me fight the same handful of robots way, way too many times.)

Even though I still followed a basic buff-and-summon routine when starting up most battles, this installment's variety of encounters had me thinking on my toes much more than the last one did. This time around, combat is finally satisying for more than just flavor text.

Unfortunately there is another aspect of Rain-Slick 4's "variety" that felt much less satisfying: it split the party, and for almost all of the game's running length, story progression swaps you between one half and the other.

That means you'll spend hours at a time leveling up one set of monsters, and learning how to use their abilities effectively, before the game suddenly shoves you into another set of monsters at a much lower level and with totally different abilities. And then in the game's final chapter, you'll need to merge those two parties into one, discarding some of each and figuring out an entirely new combat dynamic.

Given that the story is still completely linear, this hours-long forced separation of monsters and level-ups feels like a misfire.

Ultimately, though, I would have gotten over that awkward pacing - as well as the proliferation of dull "monstorb" monsters - for the sake of more Penny Arcade wit and flippancy. This game's biggest mistake is that it doesn't take adequate advantage of the franchise's core appeal: writing.

There are still fun bits of text, mind you, but fewer than last time. It seems kinda like the game wrote itself into a corner; constraining the story to "Underhell" limited its variety of environments, and splitting the party limited the amount of possible character interactions. There just aren't as many opportunities for this game's characters to react to new surprises, or to riff on one another while doing so.

So, even though I'd call Rain-Slick 4's design changes a net gameplay win - despite missteps in character progression and game-world pacing - at the end of the day, its most critical failure is reducing the amount of written dialog. Kudos for iterating on the "game" part of this game, but it just didn't play enough to Penny Arcade's writing strength.

Better than: Cosmic Star Heroine
Not as good as: Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3
But at least there's still: you know, the comic.

Progress: Finished on Normal.

Rating: Meh