Last year, I saw this meme pop up in my Facebook timeline and it resurfaced a few times over the course of the 2016 election cycle: Donald Trump’s bloated, jowly head oil painted onto Eric Cartman’s chubby, puffy-jacketed body. At the top, in Cards Against Humanity font: “You will respect my authoritah.”
And while there are certainly parallels between Cartman’s spoiled, only-child-need to have it his way and Donald Trump’s “small loan of a million dollars,” “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” entitlement, the connection between the billionaire businessman-cum-President-elect and South Park as a whole is stronger.
Both are offensive. Both are shocking. Both are the furthest thing from politically correct.
This has always been the case. When I was a kid, South Park was THE “bad show.” If I saw another kid in a South Park shirt, I assumed his parents didn’t love him. I never saw an episode until I was in high school, but, in my mind, those big-eyed paper characters were synonymous with moral decay.
Just like South Park helped pervert the animation genre—a genre synonymous with kid-friendly material—Trump made the Election— which teachers tasked their students with following—NSFW. He bragged about the size of his penis, and about groping women, and said that he wanted to date his daughter, letting shock-jock buddy Howard Stern call her a “piece of ass.”
The difference, of course, is the purpose of the filth. A typical episode of South Park ends with the kids, usually Stan and Kyle, summarizing the episode’s message. “You know, I learned something today,” comes near the 21-minute mark in almost every outing. South Park offends you to challenge you. Donald Trump offends you to keep you watching. We may have hired him to be President, but he’s still doing reality TV.
All that to say, South Park: The Stick of Truth, the first installment in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s series of RPG’s based on the first 17 seasons of their hit show, is offensive, more offensive than any single episode of the show ever has been. Stick digs deep with references from the series’ nearly two decades packed into a 15-hour-max game. It’s “Grab ‘em by the p*ssy” meets “They’re bringing crime; they’re rapists” with “I’m proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country until we can figure out what the hell is going on” sandwiched in between. This the Greatest Hits of two guys who love to shock and horrify and gross out their audience.
One of the four classes the player can choose from at the game’s outset is Jew, and if you choose it, you can unlock special moves like “Sling of David” and “Circum-scythe.” (Figure it out.) Your character gets kidnapped during his first night in South Park and probed by the mooing aliens from the series debut. And one of Stick’s major set pieces prominently features Nazi zombies and is set in an abortion clinic.
Honestly, that’s just scratching the surface. If you play Stick, you will, at some point, be uncomfortable.
But, this game gets away with offending you because it’s really, really, really funny. In fact, this may be the ideal way to experience South Park.
Playing the game feels like playing through an extra-long episode of the show. Unlike the 3D video game iterations that came before it, every moment of Stick’s gameplay looks like it belongs in the show. And with card stock graphics, abundant humor, and turn-based combat that values well-timed attacks, Stick plays like an M-rated Paper Mario installment.
The music is a mix of new, Lord of the Rings-inspired themes (with Cartman coming in every couple minutes to chant over it) when traversing the town map, and old favorites like “Montage” playing over radios in the town’s businesses.
The one downside of Stick is that its difficulty level follows an unusual and frustrating course. Whereas, it’s typical for a game to start off easy and gradually ramp up the challenge, Stick starts out hard and plateaus as your character becomes stronger. There are a few levels that you’re forced to play through without companions and those are, by far the most difficult. They require strategic thinking and liberal use of health potions, and will make you want to break your controller in half.
My favorite part of the Stick of Truth was an hour-and-a-half long segment in the game’s back half that begins with the player trekking along a path that leads out of town and up into Canada (which, it just so happens, borders South Park). Your mission is to get an important note translated from French into English. Just like in the show, Canadians all have egg-shaped heads that split in half at the mouth when they speak in their stupid sounding ,Terrence and Philip accents. As soon as you cross the border, the graphics change and suddenly you’re traveling an overworld map straight out of a 16-bit RPG, fighting Direwolves and Direbears in the Canadian wilderness. This is a brilliant change of pace, and brings a major shift in gameplay just when Stick needs it.
With Stick’s sequel, The Fractured But Whole set for a 2017 release, this is the best time to discover one of the funniest game’s of all time. Stick will challenge you— your skills and your beliefs--and it's good enough that you'll let it.
It’s terrific, folks. Big league.
