The Spiral Scouts Review

Spiral Scouts

I like to think I’m no prude. I’ve played games like Conker’s Bad Fur Day and The Stick of Truth and found them to be amusing. But the humor in Spiral Scouts was really off-putting. There’s one joke in particular about a guy who literally humps his wife to death after drinking a Viagra-like elixir. After that scene, I just couldn’t find anything about the game funny. Fortunately, scenes like this only play out as dialogue. But the dialogue in Spiral Scouts is so juvenile. Like, this is the kind of dialogue you would expect from a preteen who just discovered how to swear. It tries way too hard to be edgy.

Honestly, I would have liked the game a lot more (and I think it would have been more successful) if it had gone for a more Paper Mario-like sense of humor. I mean, they already nailed the art style. This game looks fantastic. But unless you’re going to go uber violent with it a la Happy Tree Friends, trying to adult-ify something like Paper Mario just doesn’t work. The sex and drug jokes fall flat every time, and none of the characters are likable since they only act as a conduit for the humor. The main character’s personality constantly changes depending on who she’s talking to and which jokes she needs to say next.

I still powered through the entire game, though, because I enjoyed the puzzles for the most part. Deceptively, this is not an adventure game but rather a series of unrelated puzzles. You can tackle these puzzles in any order, abandon one halfway through if you get stuck, and go find another puzzle to muse over. While many of the puzzles are pretty fun to figure out, just as many require note-taking and memorization. Yep, I had to have a pen and paper nearby, which is never my preference for video games. So that part of Spiral Scouts isn’t perfect, either. It’s a very hit-and-miss kind of experience that seems to actively try to get you to dislike it.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.