In 2016 Great Britain went to the polls and, with an extremely tiny margin, voted for an idea. It was an idea that had been bubbling beneath the surface of British politics for years until, at some point after being fuelled by constant media whining, latent racism, and one frog-faced politician given undue over-exposure by national TV stations, it lurched its way into being the single most important issue for every fucker with a view and a spot on a TV show. That idea was Britain leaving the European Union.
Economists tried to impart on the nation how badly this would knacker the UK’s currency and wealth. Talking heads spoke at length about the gross cultural stereotypes being pandered to. We even found out after the fact that the entire campaign to leave had been conducted illegally. And yet, the country decided that we should go and the then-Prime Minister, a wax-form given the breath of life but lacking the spark of compassion to truly emulate being a human being, “Call Me Dave” Cameron (you probably know him better for all the pig-fucking he allegedly did) announced that the referendum result was sacrosanct and it must be respected.
Take a breath for a second and I’ll explain why this is related to a videogame.
Her Majesty’s SPIFFING (Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One [reviewed])
Released Dec 2016 | Developed / Published: Billy Goat Entertainment
Genre: Adventure | HLTB: 2 hours
We’re starting with Brexit because it’s crucial to the backstory of Her Majesty’s SPIFFING. Developed in the run-up to the referendum, SPIFFING seems to have been written with Brexit squarely in mind. The plot certainly requires the audience to be aware of the entire phenomenon as it begins with Queen Elizabeth II issuing a royal diktat announcing her takeover of the nation with the intent of establishing a new space agency – the titular S.P.I.F.F.I.N.G. (Special Planetary Investigative Force For Inhabiting New Galaxies) – and building a new galactic-scale British Empire in the wake of Britain’s rising global unpopularity after its exit from the EU.
Well, at least they got that last bit right. Anyway, that’s how SPIFFING begins, with the clock tower of Big Ben launching into space and then falling away to reveal the horrendously named HMSS Imperialise, and her crew, Captain Frank Lee English and his subordinate, a young waifish chap named Aled Jones. If you’re getting whiffs of Secret of Monkey Island or Space Quest, that’s to be expected; many modern adventure games hearken back to the golden age of point-and-click adventures on PC around the turn of the millennium, and Her Majesty’s SPIFFING is no exception.
It’s also no exception to the rules of sub-rate comedy games, in that it immediately breaks the fourth wall and continues to rattle along in that vein until the game mercifully comes to a close. No sooner has the game begun and you’re reminded that you’re in a videogame by the main pair, and I think now’s as good a time as any to tell you that no matter how smart and witty you think you are as a writer, I promise you that you’re not good enough to make open fourth wall breaks work and be consistently funny.
We’ve talked a little before about comedy games and what does or doesn’t work. It is obviously entirely subjective what folk find funny, and I know that I don’t tend to find games that humorous because I don’t really think jokes work well over the runtime of a game, and – more often – because I think that the most common brand of humour that games use (i.e. internet-friendly “random” humour) is essentially anathema to laughter. SPIFFING, obviously, devolves into these kinds of jokes fairly quickly and, true to form, I endured them with a stone-faced sense of resignation. I’m sure there’s someone out there who finds this amusing, but I’m afraid it’s not me.
The thing is, right, that SPIFFING along with many of its ilk draw inspiration from the adventure game scene of decades past, but very few of them seem to grasp or recreate what made those games good. While many of them might have had zany senses of humour, it wasn’t often that they’d make a habit out of openly shattering the fourth wall. They might be irreverent and sometimes subtle in it, but those are concepts alien to SPIFFING.
Random humour isn’t the only string to SPIFFING’s comedic bow, however. It’s also got extremely lazy national stereotypes presented as jokes, hooray! It’s quite frankly shocking to see a game released as late as 2016 still rely on the kind of humour I can only think of as belonging to old British sitcoms of the ‘60s and ‘70s. English’s co-pilot, Aled, peppers every sentence with “boyo”, the first quest is to make a cup of tea, and everyone talks at length about how great British imperialism is. Now, you might be sitting here thinking that those are gentle pieces of humour and anyway, they’re self-deprecating, there’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I’ll allow that. It’s dull and inelegant and made me roll my eyes so hard they ran the risk of sticking backwards in my skull perpetually, but oh well. No, the stuff I had a real problem with showed up in the final act when the French arrived.
I suppose this is technically a spoiler but I don’t really recommend anyone play SPIFFING so I don’t mind. In the third act our “heroes” arrive on a desolate, alien world and decide to claim it in the name of Great Britain. However, they encounter a problem in that the French space program has also arrived on the planet at the same time. Their spaceship is a riff on Concorde – that’s what we call a good, gentle joke. The French astronauts, on the other hand, are a whole problem unto themselves. One is a short chap, who looks vaguely like former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and wears Napoleonic epaulettes on his spacesuit. He’s got opinions about cheese and wine and during one segment you distract him by releasing a frog tied to some cheddar and he scurries off to stuff them into his mouth. Hilarious.
The other French astronaut is a gorilla. Now, you might be aware, but depicting humans as gorillas has a lot of form in the history of racism. France doesn’t have a particular national association with primates, but it sure is a country with a proportion of its populace that would – correctly – take serious and great offence to being depicted as a gorilla. I’m not going to sit here and tell you the developers of SPIFFING are racists; I’ve no platform to make that claim, of course. But I refuse to believe that a developer who clearly enjoys some level of political engagement would be so blindingly dense as to not know what the implication of this particular choice would be. Even if it were made with the best of intentions – and I suppose it’s only fair to assume that it wasn’t made to be incredibly racist – surely there was someone in the team who could’ve took a second to look at what they’d made and gone, “err maybe this looks a bit on the wrong side?”
It feels a little reductive now to talk about the other stuff in SPIFFING but here we go. Although the game lets you freely control English as you meander around – a decision made specifically to make him more endearing, so job not well done chaps – it’s in every way an inheritor of the classic era of point-and-click adventures. That means you’ll listen to a bit of dialogue, get presented with a puzzle, and then go wandering off for stuff to pick up and examine, combine, and fiddle with in the hopes of latching onto whatever the developer at the time thought was logical as a solution. SPIFFING’s puzzles begin as quaint, like making a cup of tea, but they get very zany by the endgame.
Figuring out the logic of the puzzles isn’t that hard though, despite the weirdness, and that’s because SPIFFING is actually quite a compact adventure game. Boasting only three areas – the upper and lower levels of your ship, and the alien planet you land on – means that you’ve only got a limited amount of space and objects to explore and interact with. This is a good thing! It’s actually a design consideration I’d not thought about as a non-adventure game player until I watched a series called Let’s Drown Out some years ago. That series, which featured internet angry critic Yahtzee Croshaw and his friend, featured a segment called “The Ego Review” in which the pair played through Croshaw’s own games. These were mostly adventure games, and during them he talked about his deliberate decision to try and build them in order to take place over a very limited number of screens. Partly this was practical, as it meant his games actually got finished instead of languishing as ideas piled over one another, but it also lent itself to some creative design choices. These culminated in what must be his most popular games, the Silent Hill-inspired Chzo Mythos, but it was that design philosophy that I found myself thinking of (not to mention being grateful for) as I trekked through the small collection of screens that SPIFFING offers.
Just thinking about the puzzles in SPIFFING has reminded me of something else that annoyed me in it, and that’s the moments that go nowhere. There’s one bit of the game where you have to restore power to the ship after your disastrous flying buggers things up, and as the light flickers you’re treated to a scene involving a creepy figure with lank black hair – it’s some sort of reference to The Ring or PT or who cares what. It’s just a momentary reference, but it serves no purpose beyond to go “ooh, look!” like we’re in some sort of videogame-y peanut gallery.
Oh, I’ve also just remembered about the alien world of the last act, for fuck’s sake. For no good reason other than a worthless reference to Planet of the Apes there’s a destroyed Statue of Liberty waiting for you. Once the reference is out of the way, it’s still there on the world, and you have to constantly run past you, reminding you that this game has nothing approaching worthwhile writing. There’s also a shrubbery that you go past, because what kind of lackadaisical British nerd writing doesn’t include a Monty Python reference? There’s probably a law about it.
Let’s wrap things up. After I beat SPIFFING I looked up the developers and found that they were based in Northern Ireland. If you know nothing of Irish history, the short of it is that Northern Ireland is one of the lasting examples of British imperialism in action as the UK marched troops in to crush republican dissent and cause yet more misery in the name of totalitarian control. That a game about Britain colonising the stars was made by a Northern Irish company feels, to me, sickening and transgressive. If you can ignore all the politics around this game and you’re ok with its brand of jokes then you might find SPIFFING worth the cut-price entry, but I think it’s all too baked-in personally. This game doesn’t exist without Brexit, but we could all do without both.
1/7 – ABYSMAL.
Oh dear. Perhaps it’s broken, perhaps it’s savagely offensive, or perhaps it’s a barely-constructed mess. Either way, avoid it at all costs.
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