Trover Saves the Universe Review. Is it Funny?
The credits have rolled on Trover Saves the Universe. Well, actually they haven’t. Not yet. But they will. I’m still playing it. And I do intend to finish it. I just feel confident that the endgame won’t surprise or delight me enough to make this early review an invalid review. Incomplete, perhaps. But not unfair.
See, Trover saves the Universe is primarily a showcase for Justin Roiland’s brand of noncommittal riffing. Imagine you were to accuse a drunk neighbor of pooping on your carpet, and that drunk neighbor insists he did no such thing, delivering his appeal with all the incoherence and verbal hurdling over swallowed-down almost-vomit that a drunk neighbor would of course exhibit, and proudly so. That’s essentially every one of Roiland’s characters.
Basically, you get the sense that Roiland’s voice recording sessions are just him, probably high, vocalizing every single thing that comes to his mind. Sure, he’ll pause to gather his thoughts or jump into an alternate take, but where less confident writers may insist the pauses and jumps be edited out, Roiland seems to insist the opposite. It comes across as brash laziness.
And I freaking love it.
The confident laziness is enviable and it’s something special that now, today, in 2019 we call genius, but I worry. Give us a few years of copycats, inspired knockoffs, and eventual evolutions and that confident laziness will surely be remembered as just laziness. I mean, have you tried watching an episode of Beavis and Butthead today? Yeah, that’s my fear with Roiland’s present genius.
This style of delivery found its first peak with the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force during the first half of the 20-aughts and later with Roiland’s own comparatively refined Ricky and Morty. It’s still as fun today as it was back then, but this sort of fun doesn’t lend itself to a long game.
There’s a reason this game is only 5 hours long (at least, from what I hear. I haven’t finished it). The Master Shakian extemporaneous dialog delivered as a self referential commentary on the absurdity of the various wacky scenarios can only be milked for about one hour before it becomes annoying. But in the genius hands of Justin Roiland, you’ll get about 5 hours.
So, I should probably talk a bit about the gameplay, right? We’ve got a first person adventure platformer where you control Trevor on a quest to find lots of power babies. You don’t need details. It’s a 3D collect-a-thon with simple puzzles.
The game can be played in VR or regular R. I played it in the standard, non-VR, regular R mode which worked just fine, but it did for whatever reason allow me to realize a limitation of VR that I hadn’t thought about before. Virtual reality finds itself constantly justifying the presence of an omnipotent player character in a way that standard non-VR games never really had to do. Sure, standard games would often break the fourth wall, but with Virtual Reality the temptation to do so seems less like a gimmick and more of a perceived necessity. With the game Moss you play as a godlike character. Same with Astrobot. With the Resident Evil 7 VR demo your avatar’s hands are handcuffed to simulate the proximity of the player’s controller-grasping hands. Will game developers run out of clever ways to justify the player’s presence? I hope so. Then maybe VR can evolve beyond it.
With Trover Saves the Universe, your avatar is a Chairorpian, a race of beings who are tethered to chairs. It’s funny and the game gets some joke-mileage out of it. But I worry about VR trying too hard to announce that it’s VR. Trover Saves the Universe doesn’t advance the VR cause. In fact, it probably regresses it a few years. But it’s a $30 game, and it’s a hilarious game. So I don’t really care.
Justin Roiland is a genius. Squanch games should be given a Nobel prize. And somebody needs to delete this record of me ever having said that when, in 20 years, this game inevitably goes the way of Beavis and Butthead.
Learn more about Trover Saves the Universe
Credits:
- Pump Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
