That dog-eared Hand Eye Society membership card you carry in your wallet comes with a free game by Toronto developers every month. This month’s game is Jazzpunk and I’ve written an essay about how brilliantly silly it is. If you aren’t already a Hand Eye member, you can get involved and join our esteemed-ish ranks. Do it before August 15 and get Jazzpunk!

JAZZPUNK AND THE ART OF GAGS

Jazzpunk is so tongue-in-cheek its taste buds are touching tonsils. Released two years ago by Luis Hernandez and Jess Brouse of Necrophone Games, the game’s more of a giant easter egg omelette than a linear comedy-adventure.

Inspired by spy flicks and cyberpunk, Jazzpunk is an irreverent descent into side-splitting slaughter and sly references to everything under the sun. You run around as Polyblank, an agent operating for an espionage organization located in a TTC subway terminal. The game starts you there, getting you to mosey around the familiar wall tiles and abandoned train terminal turned spy headquarters. It’s the first clue of subversion in Jazzpunk: everything you know is a lie and that’s funny as hell.

Gag comedy subverts expectations, interrupting reality and behaviours with silliness. When done well, gags are one of the best examples of knowing the rules well enough to break them. On the other hand, games are governed by rules. They’re built around assuming the player knows game logic thoroughly, that mechanics and objects and non-playable characters must be interacted with appropriately.

So what happens when a game is built around gags?

Players adapt. Wanting to immerse, they try to predict unpredictability and change the way they play to induce as many scenarios as possible. It’s a brilliant form of assigning new meanings to classic mechanics.

For every mission, the spy agency plops you in a different country. The characters in these places are faceless, boldly outlined; illustrated like bathroom signs come to life in sprawling urban locales. Even from their attire, you can’t tell what goofiness will occur until you talk to them. A frog might need your help leeching Starbucks wifi. A shop owner could ask you to swat flies in her incredibly fragile vase shop. They’re all side-quests that don’t have any reward, other than incredulous laughter. You find yourself spending more time meandering through the bizarre, exploring and touching everything; slowing the pace of completion in favour of rapid-fire goofiness.

The gags merit even more laughter when the player can find ways to make the gag continue after it’s already finished. While infiltrating a Russian embassy, you can encounter a printer and for laughs, scan copies of your ass. Eventually, you’ll need to leave the room by tricking a facial recognition scanner with a photo of a scientist. But if you chose to show the scanner a copy of your ass instead, it works anyway, announcing you as some unfortunately butt-named doctor.

Another continued gag happens after the fly-swatting side-quest. If the player chooses to leave the shop with the swatter and hit passerby, they turn into flies who buzz away. However, not all characters are flies: by misleading you into thinking they all are, the game gets you to whack regular people with a flyswatter.

This level of self-awareness escalates bewilderment, leaving players unable to rely on knowledge gained from past video games and forcing gameplay to interact as absurdly as possible. Items that should be used only for certain tasks are instead brandished out whenever.

Twisting tradition is where the game shines. Hovering text, which game logic dictates as not affected by the world, occasionally shatters and falls. Your boss, whose meant to zip down suavely after debriefing you, is actually just hiding under his desk. And then there’s the plain ridiculous, where you’re whisked into a pizza dimension or a Quake mod minigame called Wedding Qake where you’re embroiled in a matrimonial throwdown.

All of these aspects thrown together create a disrupted experience of giddy confusion (and literal motion sickness, you might need to change the mouse smoothing), where any encounter could happen. Games like this, that use self-awareness as a game development tool, play with players and work to deconstruct rigid definitions of how a video game has to work. Gags as agents of revision and disruption make playing Jazzpunk an act of improvisation.

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You can buy Jazzpunk and watch the mind-bending live action (?!) trailer for it right here.