Note: A review copy of The Edge of Allegoria was provided by the publisher of this game for this review. Screenshots are from the Steam/Developer’s page, as getting them from my Switch to my PC was a pain in the butt.
Crass humor often gets a bad rap, although perhaps not an entirely unearned one. Many times, crass humor simply relies on being crass without actual substances, and other times people confuse “crass” for “offensive”, which leads to a slew of other, different problems. When I was a teenager, my parents introduced me to George Carlin as a gateway to “mature” material, and I’ll never quite forget how funny I found the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” routine that he used to do. Despite the fact that the gag was him simply repeating seven off-color words in a row, I found it hilarious; I suppose being thirteen likely helped, but I still find the routine charming today.
As I got older, I found crass humor often had to work harder and harder to make me laugh; simply just saying “bad” words, sexual innuendo, or doing “edgy” bits (that often teetered into just being offensive and cruel) began to get less and less of a reaction from me, even to the point that I rarely find offensive jokes even register as offensive. They’re just, frankly, boring. So when I was offered a copy of The Edge of Allegoria which advertises itself as “This ain’t no f@#%ing kid’s game”, I did offer to my editor that I would let them know if the game was just not for me. To my (thankful) surprise, I instead returned two weeks later having cleared the game to 100% completion; Because while the Edge of Allegoria wears its heart on its filthy sleeve, it does so in a way that was so sincere that it was oddly refreshing and charming.
Understanding the Assignment
Edge of Allegoria is ostensibly a 2D RPG that at first seems to throw players into a retro Gameboy pea green world, particularly one in which you might be tasked with catching various small monsters. If anything, the most surprising thing about Edge of Allegoria to me aside from the fact that the crass humor worked for me is that you don’t, actually, catch them all, and instead play the same character the entire time. The battle system is styled after Pokémon, but there’s no catching and training, instead allowing you to train the protagonist, and you have a fairly wide array of ways in which you can do so. There are a few skill paths you can pursue and builds you can consider, whether it’s using firearms, weapons, or essentially eldritch powers, and the versatility of how you can interact and play the game was a nice touch, as I had semi-expected the game to just ask me to bash the attack button for the next thirty hours mindlessly.
If it sounds as though my compliments are couched in negatives, the first thing that I have to do is explain that I came into this game expecting to roll my eyes and discover if there were anything worth salvaging. I ended up completing the game totally, and while there are some bumps and rough edges that we’ll get to in a bit, my shock was mostly at the fact that the game has a lot of charm, whether it is in the (extremely profane) dialogue and interactions or the ways in which it tries to experiment with retro 2D rpg mechanics. I play games to play a game, and I was happy to find out that Edge of Allegoria understands what makes a 2D RPG fun to play: battle mechanics.
Story, aesthetics, exploration, all of that matters, but nothing really matters as much to me in a 2D RPG than how good it feels to fight enemies, something that Pokémon never really improved on to the point of being satisfying. The original Pokémon games were fun because they were new, but 20+ years later, I often find the actual ‘grind’ of playing the games interminable as every battle is just mashing A until my over-leveled (not even by choice) team steamrolls the game. “But Marcy, Pokémon is for children,” you say, and yes, I agree. That doesn’t mean that I don’t get bored in the process.
Allegoria tries to address that by giving you multiple choices of how your protagonist can function. There’s no great skill tree, perks, or other modern evolutions, but you do at least get the feeling that you can take your character in the path you enjoy and the game allows and supports you in doing that build. This is also good because you never get another party member, so the ability to do different things and try “magic” or “physical” builds (to simplify) is welcome; unlike a 2D RPG like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, you have no party, jobs, or classes, and so “who” you are in battles is mostly down to your own preferences. And, honestly, it’s nice to see a modern vision of “retro” RPGs give status ailments the ability to actually work!
Mechanically, the game is very simple; there’s nothing hiding in this game that is going to suddenly spring modern controls and mechanics on you, and so the “use the controller to move and press a few buttons to confirm or deny actions” is exactly what you expect and what you’ll get. This was fine for me, because my connection to older games more or less gave me the knowledge of what I could or couldn’t do within this sandbox, but if you aren’t very familiar with games like Pokémon, especially the older handheld game versions, some of this game may seem achingly old fashioned.
Innuendo You Go
Assuming that “retro 2D RPG like Pokémon” is a type of game you enjoy playing, then the next bar that will potentially turn you off or on the game is the exceptionally frequent aforementioned crass humor. This is a game that doesn’t just liberally use expletives, the entire top of the shaker came off and poured every conceivable non-slur expletive into the mix. I think that the game sells itself a little short by pushing the “crass” label, as the idea of “Have you ever seen Pikachu smoke a blunt and say fuck” is exactly the right type of message to turn off probably as many people as it turns on to the game. This game does use expletives a lot, and characters make reference to using drugs, sex acts, sex work, and just about anything “adult” that games for “kids” avoids.
What shocked me is the way in which the game does it, which is: Sincerely. The jokes don’t always land in a way that makes me laugh so hard I cry, but I have to be appreciative of the fact that a game in which the protagonist exclaims his sexual excitement at some of the female characters he encounters treats sex work as a legitimate actual form of work, and your character being a horndog isn’t played through his demeaning women; he’s just horny, and crude. The fact that he actually gets excited to meet women in the game instead of terrified of monsters made me laugh, and after a while I stopped expecting the other shoe to drop and have the game launch into gross objectification. Yes, the “sexy” pixels are kind of cheesy, but not to the point of requiring a video essay about it. The characters curse, but they don’t use slurs, they don’t demean minorities, and they don’t devolve into homophobia, and the more I realized it, the more I found myself at least smiling through the game.
That doesn’t mean that the humor can’t get a little exhausting after a while; the game took me around 30 hours to complete fully, and there were periods in which I started to feel the crassness grate on me, so I put the game down and came back to it later. Thankfully, the game remained fun throughout the experience, so I always found myself coming back to finish it after taking a break, but if you find this type of humor not your speed, I will say that there is unlikely to be anything Edge of Allegoria can do to win you over.
Old Games Require Modern Solutions
Edge of Allegoria knows exactly what it wants to be, and is shockingly good at executing that: it is very much a 2D “retro” RPG, and it follows that through in just about every conceivable way you can imagine: there is overworld exploration that includes a mode of fast-travel (an item that I won’t spoil because it did make me laugh at how silly it was) like Pokémon’s bike, a massive map that can become easy to get lost in, fairly consistent but not overwhelming battles, and of course, a fishing game.
There is even a narrative shift in the second half in which the very silly and almost absurdly stupid plot shifts to having some amount of thrust, although it never quite takes that too far to make the game feel lopsided or uneven. I did actually appreciate the story attempting to have something to “say”, not necessarily in the sense that it was profound, but just that the developer ensured that my 30 hours would feel as though I had gone through an actual story arc with stakes instead of 30 hours of seeing the word “Fuck” and “Shit” with no actual trajectory.
Of course, even though the narrative has something to “say”, it doesn’t get bogged down in the attempt to “say” that thing, and there were a few moments when I was worried the game would suddenly rugpull me and go on some sort of tirade, but instead the game really just wants to treat being and playing games as absurd and silly, and the fact that one of the strongest weapons in the game is A Giant Dildo, it is certainly doing exactly that.
Some of my issues with the game comes from the fact that it tries to hew too close to retro aesthetics and philosophies about games more than it does about the humor or writing; there were times in which I would take a break, especially during a day or so away from the game, and I’d come back realizing I had almost no idea what I was doing before I quit. None of the puzzles or quests or challenges were ever exceptionally difficult to the point of frustration, but it was more that there are certainly some things to be said for the way modern games approach quests and challenges that help when you play them in short amounts of time in between juggling life. None of this ever made me quit the game or want to give up, but having to guess at what I was doing and what I needed to do, and some trial and error, reminded me of the fact that retro games are retro for a few reasons, and evolutions in design philosophy is one of the ways games have greatly evolved over time.
The One Word You Can Say, Objectionably: Fun
In some of my recent reviews and as a general philosophy, I try to approach media from how I enjoyed it and what sort of vibe I got from it. This can be difficult because the idea of “fun” is treated as an exceptionally subjective and almost empty term, because what is fun for one person may very well not be for another. But I use the metrics of fun/enjoyment/vibes because I am a 43 year old trans woman living in what is more or less the modern waking version of something worse than hell, and I don’t have the time or money to spend on things that suck. I refuse to spend 80 USD on a mid game and I refuse to devote my limited time to something that I “will learn to enjoy” after 40 hours, and so even though it is at a generous 19.99 USD, Edge of Allegoria had a lot of work to do to win me over.
That said, the game is still one I recommend, with some heavy consideration: If you like 2D Retro RPGs that want you to think of the Gameboy era of games, not just Pokémon but also games like Link’s Awakening, then the gameplay in Edge of Allegoria will feel familiar and potentially fun for you, but the over abundance of crass humor is going to be the deciding factor as to whether you tolerate the game long enough to experience what it wants to offer you in that genre. I found it silly and funny, but I will admit that the game was funnier when it tried for jokes that didn’t rely on expletive bombs. None of the humor feels mean spirited or at the expense of vulnerable communities, which I really just expected due to the current climate of games as art, media, and reactions to current events and trends.
But if a crass and silly 2D RPG in which you can utilize eldritch powers to drive your enemies mad and then also hit them with a giant dildo in between fishing minigames sprinkled with self loathing and staring into the abyss of existence sounds like a game you’d enjoy, then I suggest checking out Edge of Allegoria on either Switch (which is where I played) or Steam. I just also recommend that you have a notepad or something nearby if you are a slow player or plan to take breaks in between, because the game may not be your mama’s RPGs, but it is also not your kid’s, either, and there’s no quest log to save you from forgetting what you were doing two days ago.
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