I will never forget the day my uncle told me about his neighbour’s cat Malcolm. Partly because my family always manage to crowbar it into conversation somehow whenever we get together, but mostly because Malcolm is indeed, by all accounts, a bit of a shit (pardon the swear). Every day, he’d waltz through my uncle’s cat flap, gobble up the two lots of food he’d put down for his own pair of scaredy-cats, then turn around and promptly leave again. Certain retellings sometimes have him peeing on the mat. Others, puking his guts up.
Death of the Reprobate reviewDeveloper: Joe RichardsonPublisher: Joe RichardsonPlatform: Played on PC and Steam DeckAvailability: Out on 7th November on PC (Steam)
I was reminded of Malcolm this week playing Joe Richardson’s latest Renaissance-painting-come-to-life adventure game Death of the Reprobate. In it, you also play a bloke called Malcolm the Shit, and I reckon they’d get along famously. Within seconds of starting, you get to see precisely how Malcolm earned his obnoxious suffix as he doles out all manner of terrible punishments on petty criminals who have dared to upset him. As they’re wheelbarrowed into his throne room, Death of the Reprobate’s over the top dialogue immediately sets the tone for what’s about to follow, and when a messenger arrives saying your father, John the Immortal, isn’t living up to his name after all, off you trot to visit him and hopefully claim your inheritance before he pops his clogs.
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But like father like son, old John knows what a stinking turd of a man Malcolm’s become back at court, and tasks him with performing seven good deeds before sundown to prove he’s worthy of his earthly riches. ‘The Lord will guide you,’ you’re told ambiguously, which is probably appropriate, given the period and all, but then you step outside and find ‘The Lord’ quite literally standing across from you in the bushes, holding a big pointy sign above the head of your first, unwitting quarry. I guess The Lord works in mysterious ways after all, it seems.
Thus begins your droll point and click odyssey to help seven local peasants in the nearby backwater, with each one requiring their own unique cocktail of fetch quests and puzzle items to acquire before you can cross them off your to-do list and consider the deed done. It’s classic adventure game fare, in other words, albeit presented through the lens of comically repurposed real-life paintings, with characters, scenes and landscapes all thrown together to create a surreal, but always entertaining village of miscreants.