Note: there are some spoilers here, although I don't think this game has any real plot to spoil. Still, discretion advised.
Jazzpunk is one of the most indirectly, aptly titled games ever made. The title creates a supposition of combining incompatible genres: the complex, smooth, theory-adjacent Jazz and the simple, anyone-can-play-it ferocity of Punk. The thought feels like a Kafkaesque joke, even if one can sort of conceive how it might sound. The game, likewise, is chock full of these little contradictory or otherwise pun-like jokes. And by chock full, I mean a cacophony of them drowning out anything even remotely like substance. But substance isn't anything, and a game can just be fun for being what it is. For the most part, Jazzpunk fulfills this end of the bargain, being a chaotically silly romp with little point and a winking glance towards the absurdity that any task a game could give you was ever something meaningful anyway. Where it fails, however, is being anything other than a brief distraction.
The basic summation of Jazzpunk, as much as one could give, is that it is an adventure game where you play as a human-or-robot named Polyblank, who is a secret agent tasked with several missions, each one absurd and hardly what you'll spend most of your time on. It's a MacGuffin in the most video game way, giving you a simple yet silly task that can be ignored indefinitely in favor of exploring the crazy worlds the game plops you down into. Interaction with the game is mostly walking around, clicking on things that look like they may react, and occasionally tripping over a minigame or two. In the most honest sense, Jazzpunk is an Easter egg hunt for small jokes, references, and random triggers for absurd scripted events. And that is about it, just shy of a walking simulator but with out any semblance of a story or point to hold it together.
The game was published by Adult Swim, and their trademark absurdity runs rampant throughout. The game is pretty funny, but never as funny as it thinks it is. You start missions by taking a pill, the secret agency you work for is outfitted in an abandoned subway station, and you beat the baddie by inflating his ego until he can be popped like a balloon with a needle. Its silly stuff, but not really "haha" funny, if you know what I mean. In the third mission, you go on vacation to a tropical resort where you can bump into several stand ins for Hunter S. Thompson. His zany side seems to have been an inspiration for Jazzpunk, but it lacks any of his insight or interesting interaction with his subjects. It all feels like hollow references with little to tie it together. The game is creative, I'll give it that. I was never sure of what I was going to find next, and it did occasionally have me laughing out loud (such as a sequence where you have a Street Fighter styled fight with a Nissan, with a picture of the bloody, damaged Nissan if you beat it), but more often than not had me rolling my eyes (like when one secret agent asks you "Do you have the MacGuffin?", or the minigame Wedding Cake, a Quake clone made seemingly around a lame pun).
It can be hard to judge, since this may be a matter of taste when it comes to the humor. The Quake clone, after all, was mostly just a harmless joke. But for me, it was how many of these lame jokes mounted up by the end of it. Unfortunately, whether you find it funny or not, you won't find it particularly fun. Most of the game has you exploring the various levels looking for Easter eggs, but, forgetting what made exploration fun in the first place, most of these eggs are little more than lame puns or meaningless dressing. Exploration is one of my favorite aspects of video games, and while little jokes are often a fun reward for thorough exploration in most games, an entire game made up of nothing but is tiring really quick. And that is the crux of it really. When I was younger, I bought a DVD of all the Mr. Bill shorts from Saturday Night Live. Watching them sequentially without the body of SNL to contextualize the the shorts - which were really a sort of pallet cleanser more than anything - made them more irritating and meaningless rather than fun. It wasn't them themselves that were interesting or funny, it was how they were situated in something else and provided a much needed moment of change to help the pacing along. That's what Jazzpunk is in a nutshell. It's a collection of all the Mr. Bill shorts in a row, for 2 hours, and it gets mighty tiring by the end of it.
6.5
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