PROGRESS QUEST

I've been dipping in and out of the RPG Maker community for about five years now, and I've seen more than enough dreadful 'parody' RPGs, almost all of which are called either Bob's Adventure or The Adventures of Bob. Get it? Because Bob is a mundane name! That's not even true. Nobody is called Bob anymore. It's probably less common than Skyler. I digress; The point is that these aren't, to come over all Womble for a second, true RPG parodies, because they just parody the plot conventions rather than the actual gameplay itself, and once the alleged hilarity of playing as Bob wears off, you're stuck with a game that's just as dull and repetitive as the ones it makes fun of. Progress Quest, on the other hand, isn't as lazy and unimaginative as CrAzY_gUy_1987. It's probably a work of genius.

Choose a race, a class, roll some starts and click OK. The game does the rest automatically, so you can just minimize it and do something else. I've gained two levels while writing this review

Edit: It was five by the time I'd finished.



It works out a way to accurately parody tedious, repetitive, pointless RPG gameplay without actually being a tedious, repetitive and pointless experience - the player isn't required to actually do anything, including paying any attention to the game at all. The end result is an examination of dull games as opposed to simply a dull game itself.



The fact it's no fun at all is the whole point.



There was recently a lengthy and ultimately pointless debate about whether or not video games could be considered art, with the major bone of contention being that, since the player is interacting with and influencing the direction of the game, they're not necessarily experiencing what the author intended them to. Progress Quest, while the events within are random, can't be affected by the player, which would suggest that it isn't a game at all. However, its online mode does offer competition between players to see who has the most powerful character - in other words, who has left the program running for the longest amount of time, rather than who is the most skilled. The fact that the sole measure of success in the game is the amount of time a player logs makes an effective satirical statement about the genre as a whole, rather than the predictable "GEE THERE SURE IS A LOT OF SLIME" route that every other parody game I've ever played has taken, and the statement is built into the way the game plays - it could not have been made as effectively in any other medium.

What's more, by cutting the player off from the action and forcing them to view it from a detached perspective, the genre's faults are easier to examine, since the player has no menial tasks to distract them. This guy thinks the game is 'retarded', and he's right: What fun is there to be gained from sitting there for hours on end and performing repetitive tasks in order to watch some abstract numbers increase? Why would you pay a monthly fee to do it? If there's no way to win and every session is virtually identical, why play at all?

Not that there aren't reasonable answers to these questions (ie. "It's basically fun as long as you maintain some kind of connection to reality and don't starve yourself to death"), but the fact that the author of Progress Quest intentionally sets out to raise them, and does so every time the game is played, using the medium of the game itself rather than embedded text or video, probably* makes Progress Quest a piece of satirical artwork rather than a standard video game.

It's still not any fun to play, though.

Five Roger Eberts out of five.

* I say 'probably' because my only foray into actual art studies lasted one semester, and the first class began with our lecturer saying that art was impossible to define in concrete terms. While I have no real problem with this line of thinking, it wasn't as if we reached it after years of discussion and analysis; he just dropped it on us on day one and then did nothing but nod regardless of what people said during class, because we were all right in our own unique way. After six months, we had established that lots of people liked Quentin Tarantino "because he used flashbacks", and that was basically it. I decided there were probably better uses for my time and money and switched to another course where the students' facial hair wasn't nearly as irritating.