Jokes and video games often have a tumultuous, challenging relationship with one another, frequently relying on internet memes and broad slapstick to maximize their placement on the ol' global humor relateability index. This tends to be more the case when the studio is foreign - this week's game comes to us courtesy of Pixelatto in Spain - because there's a built-in perception that cultural humor won't travel much further than your own country's borders. It's perhaps a minor miracle, then, that Reventure is one of the most amusing spins on a wild conceit for a deeply meta if also deeply stupid Indie game since, perhaps, McPixel or Jazzpunk.

Reventure posits a world where a local hero is tasked by the King to rescue his daughter, the Princess, from the lair of the Dark Lord using the Legendary Sword found on a nearby mountaintop. The player might then choose to follow this destined path of theirs for one of the game's endings. However, the game also has 99 other endings, almost none of which have the same degree of heroism or competency involved. Reventure is built on the same model as the auspicious Don't Shit Your Pants (by Cellar Door Games, the Rogue Legacy guys!) or the experimental IF game Aisle (by Sam Barlow, the Her Story/Telling Lies guy!) in that a single playthrough may only be minutes in length, but the sheer variety of conclusions you can attain is only limited by the player's (or really the developer's) imagination. You might take that Legendary Sword and stab the nearby kindly old man who tells you it's dangerous to go alone. You could try swinging it at a guard, or the King. You could get as far as the Princess's prison cell within the Dark Lord's castle and stab her with it, if you've already figured out the route to get there. And that's just one of many veins to mine (or poke swords through, as the case may be).

The game experience is also directed by some very clever limitations and some rewarding discoveries as you continue to experiment, explore, and unlock new endings. Said limitations are due to how the inventory system works: while most heroes have bottomless pockets, your protagonist will be laden down by the weight of most of the game's gear, decreasing their maximum jump height the more pieces of equipment they have. This can often lead to some rerouting as you work out how to get to an area with a lesser jumping ability, as some gear like the hookshot will still help you get around easier despite the extra weight. Since almost every ending is canonical one way or another, and some amount of time passes between each one, the world will shift as you complete endings to reflect these changes, occasionally opening up permanent shortcuts and streamlining exploration as well as no end of small visual details (mostly pools of your own, or someone else's, blood). You'll also acquire a number of different protagonist appearances, different visual filters for the graphics, and the ability to change fundamental aspects about the game in the pause menu.

The game also has an ample hint system and, after acquiring enough endings, provides tools to help you locate the rest: a compass at first, which gives you the general direction to where the next ending will occur, and later a map to pinpoint its exact location. Worth noting that both the compass/map and the hints won't explicitly reveal what you need to do, but collectively provide a jumping off point for the player to suss out from there. Even with these boons, it's more fun to try and figure out as many endings as you can on your own initiative first, taking the time to explore your surroundings thoroughly for secret paths and trying out as many new possibilities as you can conceive. If nothing else, going back to sleep is always an option.

Naturally, with a game like this where the ideal playing experience is predicated so much by surprise and sudden inspiration, I'm loath to discuss too much about its inner workings or its capacity for sociopathic mayhem lest I spoil any more than I already have with the above text or the screenshots peppered throughout. It's perhaps worth noting that the game is not without its flaws: it can be annoyingly easy to trigger an "easier" ending en route to something more involved, and several endings will have you running across one end of the world to the other with obtuse goals in mind. With 100 endings, there's a lot of set-up and areas you'll be playing through many times over, notably getting to the Dark Lord's castle (where any path involving the Dark Lord or the Princess will typically need to start) on the far eastern side of the world. Some aforementioned shortcuts do make all this repeat navigation simpler and more convenient, but it'll take a few hours of finding new endings before they'll appear. The world isn't so large that a single path will ever take that long, even the more elaborate ones, but part of enjoying the game's surprises will involve an initial investment of exploring the world and understanding the map and the various routes it provides. Imagine, if you would, what would be involved in running a randomizer ROM hack: you'd need to have some significant familiarity with the attached game(s) before you can start rolling with the new changes and modifiers. Honestly though, I find reaching that level of mastery over a domain to be rewarding enough in itself, and planning out where I can go and what I can do on the fly when a platform proves just a little too high to reach or has been blocked off for some reason or another is one of the more subtle aspects of the game's appeal.

If you liked the general fourth-wall-breaking silliness and unpredictable nature of McPixel, and wanted something akin to an open-world platforming adventure riffing on The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest with which to frame that chaotic comedic energy, then Reventure is what you're looking for. It's a game both suited to a casual audience who just want to spend a few hours trying whatever ideas pop into their heads to see if the game rewards them with a unique ending for their trouble, as well as those slightly more obsessive types like myself who want to figure out every single one of these disparate destinies via the hints, the map/compass, and their own creativity to discover what the true finishing line actually looks like. I also think it can be really funny (some endings more than others), and that's no easy feat for a video game to pull off either.

Rating: 5 out of 5. (NB: Played on Switch.)