Board 8 > Recommend me cheap games with good comedic writing

(+) Yeah! (+)

Doing research for an upcoming game I'm working on (KuloNiku: Meatball Cooking on Steam).

The director wants the dialogue to be more comedic and I find it to be quite challenging. I'm pretty confident in both my English and my writing, but English is my second language still and comedy is very subjective.

So yeah, give me some recommendations for games that you think are funny.

A Hat in Time

There are lots of styles of comedy. What are you going for? Slapstick? Absurdist? Cringe humor? Wordplay?

Disco Elysium

I think the owners still have it on internet a-oh just checked nevermind

Thank Goodness You're Here

The Looker

Tales from the Borderlands (when it's on sale)

OMGWTFOTL (it's free)

Heaven Burns Red (it's F2P)

Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt

Thanks, everyone. Keep 'em coming.

trdl23 posted...

There are lots of styles of comedy. What are you going for? Slapstick? Absurdist? Cringe humor? Wordplay?

Good point.
For the research anything goes, especially if it makes good use of the video game medium. But my personal style leans towards the more offbeat/absurdist by building on the context of the world and character.

I know these are very weeb stuff, but my references are stuff like 100 Girlfriends Who Really (x5) Love You, Learning with Manga! Fate/Grand Order, and Nozaki-kun.

Stanley Parable

428: Shibuya Scramble

Often goes on sale for like 10 bucks as well.

Portal 1 and 2 are probably pretty cheap now

I'll be honest, I think a lot of games that try to be "comedy games" don't really pull it off. A lot of the time they come off as very juvenile and, like, self-aware in a way that feels almost patronizing? It's hard to describe. "Cringe" as a word is pretty overused these days but it does get at the same idea I'm trying to describe here. In fact, when I ctrl+F'd for "humor", "comedy", and "joke" in my big list of game write-ups almost every mention was negative. So I'm mostly not going to recommend comedy games, but rather games that pull off some solid laughs even if they're typically serious.

Final Fantasy VII
Metroid Prime, specifically the scan data
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (specifically this one. and maybe Vestaria Saga 1)
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (specifically this one)
Ace Attorney series + Ghost Trick
Pokemon (specifically RBY, GSC, RSE, and DPP, and not their remakes)
Paper Mario 1 and 2
Pikmin 1 and 2
The World Ends With You
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
Tales of Vesperia, and probably most other Tales games too but this one stands out to me
Killer7
Celeste
Astalon: Tears of the Earth
Nine Sols
Bug Fables
Cassette Beasts
Gone Home
Hades
Paradise Killer
We Know the Devil
Katawa Shoujo
A Space for the Unbound (but I think you're aware of this one already...!)

A few less serious games, where the humor does land for me:

Portal
Katamari Damacy
Kid Icarus: Uprising
Stanley Parable
Deltarune (but not Undertale)
Princess Remedy duology
Super Lesbian Animal RPG
SWOLLEN TO BURSTING UNTIL I AM DISAPPEARING ON PURPOSE
Tomomi

Most of these should be on the cheap end of things, except the out-of-print ones which you'd probably need to emulate anyway

It's been a while, but I remember Tales of Abyss having funny, witty writing

Fear and Hunger

I'll throw Norco a mention

Hypnospace Outlaw

Jazz Punk