I'm going to use Austin's (very good) post about the problems with Forspoken's style of self-conscious, self-referential writing to talk about three examples of games that do the same type of thing but much more successfully (and all for different reasons!)
Sunset Overdrive
By rights, a game that touts itself as being about "the Awesomepocalypse", boasting a cast of broad caricatures such as preppy high schoolers and LARPers, which constantly makes jokes referencing self-knowledge that it's a video game, should suck absolute dick. It should be unbearable. It should be Cringe Ground Zero. And YET, Sunset Overdrive's humor hits far more often than it misses.
The reason for this is simple: unlike Forspoken, Sunset Overdrive and its cast of characters understand that you are, in Austin's words, "here for the artifice". Rather than being embarrassed by its videogamey-ness, Sunset Overdrive revels in it, secure in an admirable sense of dick-swinging confidence that doing so will in no way diminish how cool or fun the game is. This level of buy-in is evident in every aspect of the game, from its voice performances, to its quest design, to its movement, to its enemy design, right down to its user interface often popping in to deliver some of the funniest punchlines I've ever witnessed in a AAA title.
There's a very Looney Tunes quality to Sunset Overdrive's approach to self-referential humor, now that I think about it. Bugs Bunny might make snide asides about his circumstances to the audience, but there's no doubt that he's every inch bought-in on making sure Elmer Fudd thinks it's Duck Season.
The Stanley Parable/Ultra Deluxe
The Stanley Parable (along with its Ultra Deluxe sequel/expansion) is one of the funniest video games ever made, full stop (at least, "funniest" as measured among "single-player game experiences that are deliberately trying to be funny most of the time"). And it accomplishes this via constant, relentless commentary on everything the player is doing, interspersed with more far-reaching commentary on video game culture and development.
One reason this kind of self-awareness works for The Stanley Parable when it doesn't for Forspoken is, of course, a vast gulf in quality between the jokes written for each. Austin stops short of making this observation in his piece out of an admirable commitment to diplomacy, but I feel it shouldn't go unsaid: the writing in Forspoken is not very good. Whether this comes from the writers defensively keeping themselves from writing anything too earnestly and thus exposing themselves to accusations of Cringe or if they're just flat-out incompetent is up for debate, but what I don't think can be realistically argued against is that the so-called "jokes" written for Forspoken are limp, weak things, delivered by voice actors not bothering to keep their sneers from becoming audible.
However, the bigger reason is structural, going down to the very bones of both experiences. The Stanley Parable is a game precision-engineered to be funny. The narration voiceover is crystal-clear, pitch-perfect at all times. The level geometry is often tweaked to accommodate the length of voiceovers, meaning that the player will often have just finished listening to one voiceover by the time they trigger the next one. The world is replete with secrets to find, and it often feels like the game itself is reacting very naturalistically to the player finding new things (if such a term can be used to describe a trickster-god-esque set of voiceovers and systems constantly rewriting reality just to set up a joke).
Forspoken, by contrast, isn't. It's a high-energy 3rd-person action RPG that nakedly WANTS to be funny, but can't ever manage it for reasons it can't seem to comprehend. It's kind of like Elon Musk in that way - all this money, all these resources, so desperate to be thought of as clever and cool, falling flat at every turn. In place of jokes you get a constant stream of smirking, disaffected chatter, like someone in a movie theater who won't fucking shut up. You can practically feel the writers nudging to you and going "Eh? Eh?" after every fresh attempt at comedy.
This problem isn't unique to Forspoken, I should mention. There is an epidemic misunderstanding within the games industry as to what it takes to make a game that is Actually Funny. You NEED the kind of thorough structural commitment that The Stanley Parable perfected. You need writers who are funny, yes, but those same writers need to have their writing working in concert with the work of sound design, systems designers, character artists, user experience designers, and gameplay programmers, all of whom need to contribute in order to ensure that the humor of a joke actually survives the journey from script to screen.
Pathologic
If you haven't played Pathologic or Pathologic 2 (and, let's be honest, most people haven't), do yourself a favor and watch Hbomberguy's wonderful video essay on it. It's just two hours! Enjoy!
(Significant spoilers for the plot of Pathologic beyond this point. You've been warned!)
Now that you're back (or if you HAVE played Pathologic, in which case I apologize profusely for my presumption), you might be a touch confused as to its inclusion on this list. Pathologic is pretty far from being a comedic game, after all. Maybe I meant to add Disco Elysium?
Fuck you! Pathologic combines the invulnerable genre-inhabiting confidence of Sunset Overdrive with the narrative-enriching systems design of The Stanley Parable AND it was released like a decade before either of those games AND it's a delicious layer cake of self-referential comedy to boot.
On its surface, a story about three doctors attempting to preserve an impoverished steppe township in the face of a deadly, mysterious plague might not seem ripe with comedic potential (though if you think this, it indicates a sore need to consume more Russian narratives. As a people, they have distilled Bleak Humor to a potency no other culture has yet to even approach). The game is brutal, punishing, frequently and deliberately unfair, the resolution of its narratives rife with tragedy and moral compromise.
However! As the player peels back Pathologic's layers and attains a more perfect understanding of its totality, they are rewarded with new perspective which skews the self-seriousness encountered at the surface level - as could only be achieved within a video game narrative! The Bachelor - so educated and proper, spouting Latin phrases - is a bumbling, toadying dolt as seen through the eyes of the Haruspex, and yet the true DEPTHS of The Bachelor's self-regarding imbecility is only appreciable to players who have played through BOTH campaigns (full context on The Bachelor's burning of the sacrificial bull, for example, is HILARIOUS). Similarly, it is Pretty Fucking Funny that The Haruspex, desperate to prove himself innocent of his father's murder, cannot seem to keep himself from killing children and hurling himself down 10-storey drops.
The grandest punchline of all comes in a couple of desperately-difficult-to-access in-game conversations with the developers themselves, first as the Haruspex and later as The Changeling. In these conversations, the developers completely cop to the game's contrivances, but then counter by asking, well, what did you expect? You're playing a game. Did you forget? None of these people or events are REAL, so why do you care? But you DO care. At that point, you care so MUCH. The devs are also very good-natured, admitting freely to The Changeling's campaign being rushed, allowing the player to poke fun at their frustrating narrative branching mechanics - the conversation happens on a theater stage, and indeed, it feels like nothing so much as having an informal discussion with a couple of stage producers after the curtain has fallen and everyone else has gone home. It is, in a word, sublime.
Forspoken doesn't exist in the same GALAXY as this level of jocular, companionable meta-textual payoff. Pathologic is so far beyond Forspoken in the sophistication of its comedy that the distance between them is impossible to chart. It is the comparison of an amoeba to a great blue whale. Forspoken outclassed in every way by a dogshit-looking Russian indie game almost 20 years its senior. Sad!
Wrapping Up
This was fun! I've been grinding super hard all through January trying to finish Opportunity, so spending a couple hours blasting out an essay dunking on a shit triple-A title we're all going to forget about in a month while also celebrating several of my favorite games felt pretty good. Really clears the old sinuses. Well! Back at it.
