Go! Go! GOTY! 2016: Day Seven: Her Majesty's SPIFFING

Day Seven

• Game: Billy Goat Entertainment's Her Majesty's SPIFFING.
• Release Month: December. Today, in fact.
• Quick Look: Not yet.
• Started: 07/12.
• Completed: 07/12.

(So let's start this one off with a disclaimer: I was very kindly given a review copy of this game after mentioning it on my last Sunday Summaries update. It's almost like I'm a legitimate videogamesm'n. Almost.)

Her Majesty's Spiffing is a parodic graphic adventure game made fondly in the traditional style of pointing at things and clicking on them. Sort of like The Book of Unwritten Tales series, except with more sci-fi and cultural references only British people will get. The game was at least partially funded via Kickstarter, as is my understanding, and even with its modest budget features a lot of 3D environments, voice actors, licensed music, and all that jazz. I feel like I'm reading through a bulletpoint list of features, which they absolutely did not pay me to do before anyone suggests it, so let's summarize the plot and then move onto the meat and potatoes of the review.

The fallout and reputational hit resulting from the Brexit referendum (topical!) convinces the Queen to assume control of the country and begin colonizing space to establish a new British Empire, giveen that we've lost too much clout down here on Earth. She sends two of the finest British astronauts Her Majesty's new government could afford: Captain Frank Lee English (it's a pun, you see) and Sub-Lieutenant Aled Jones, who is not the singer but is still very Welsh. In their efforts to plant the Union Jack on a new planet in the name of Queen Elizabeth II and the United Kingdom, a series of unfortunate mishaps occur that threaten to jeopardize their mission, each of which requiring the use of items found around the ship to solve, which in turn often need items to reach them, and so on and so forth. It's an adventure game.

What stands out most is the game's sense of humor. If you have a penchant (or strong dislike) for fourth-wall breaking humor, and I mean absolutely relentless fourth-wall breaking humor, be advised that this game has it. The jokes tend towards the hit-or-miss equation in general, but then so do mine, so I'll at least say that I laughed a few times during the game's run. At the really dumb goofs too, no less. The puzzles were fair enough and occasionally had me stuck for a spell, though the game lacks those convenient features many new adventure games do where they'll highlight interactive hotspots with a button press and eliminate them once they've been exhausted of their silly joke(s) if they have no other relevance to the task at hand. The game's also absurdly short: the developers joke as much when the game suddenly ends and a pop-up message states that they ran out of money. Honesty's always the best policy in this case, I suppose. For the asking price on Steam, though, I'd say you'd get your money's worth from the runtime. It'd take about an hour if you knew exactly what to do, but then that's always the hazard when estimating the run-time of an adventure game: chances are, you'll be racking up extra hours stuck on a puzzle and trying to use every object on every other object. (By the by, the part about using everything on everything? The game jokes about that too. I tell ya, that fourth wall stuff don't quit.)

I did run into a few unfortunate bugs too. I wouldn't recommend using the air compressor in the airlock without having an item on hand, because your protagonist just stands there forever until you reload a prior save. Ditto for one part later on where my guy just ran around in circles while clipping through the world. A few minor gamebreaking issues that are ameliorated by a very generous auto-save system, and probably par for the course for a game that literally came out hours ago; I don't play enough games on day of release to know for sure how common that is (and it might be I still had the beta testing version installed, though I'd assume it would update to the full version automatically).

In general though, I think it's a fine little Indie adventure game, with the right balance of puzzle difficulty and an impressive amount of work put into its presentation, and just a handful of reservations about the stability, length and wishing it would back the eff down a tad from all the meta stuff. I suspect we might see future "episodes" of this series based on how well this one performs, as this is a strong basis to build from. If you're a fan of The Book of Unwritten Tales or of traditional point-and-click games in general, I'd say check it out, if only so the devs can continue making new adventures of the HMSS Imperialise and its stalwart crew of two incompetents. Especially since some cheapskate didn't even pay for his copy.

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