Starting as a Kickstarter in 2017, and based on the wildly popular webcomic, Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse has finally released on Steam. As Part 1 of a trilogy, players are tasked with helping the 'perpetual loser' Coop McCarthy find a prom date through a classic point-and-click style of gameplay. Coop has aspirations of becoming a superhero and saving the world but is constantly bullied and cast aside. The overall narrative of the game plays well to the dark humor that permeates everything Cyanide & Happiness has created over the years, but the overly simplistic puzzles and a constant stream of useless dialog makes getting through the game a chore.
The gameplay in Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse mimics the point-and-click style perfectly. Objectives are simple and require exploration and basic puzzle knowledge to complete. Co-op can interact with a huge amount of characters and objects in three ways: look, touch, talk. The real grind of the game comes from the fact that all three options are accessible to everything. Players will have to look, touch, and talk to every single object in a room to ensure they've covered all their bases. Many objects even require multiple interactions to clear them, so talking to a mailbox two or three times is completely plausible. Also, many of the NPCs in the game are just Kickstarter backers who don't progress the story or even offer sidequests. This makes the 'feature' of hundreds of objects just feel like unnecessary padding.
Despite the overabundance of interactable objects in Freakpocalypse, the game has an incredibly short playtime. The actual main story and sidequests can easily be beaten within two hours, especially when the player starts to notice the slight differences in things that can be picked up and ones that are just uselessly clickable. The ending comes out of nowhere and only leads to a cliffhanger moment that leaves a feeling of unfulfillment. There is also a complete lack of auto-save, so if a player finishes the game in one sitting but wants to go back and finish any uncompleted side quests, without any manual saves they are out of luck.
The Cyanide & Happiness team is generally hilarious, but the jokes in Freakpocalypse fall flat throughout the short amount of time spent in it. There is an abundance of references to old C&H comics and shorts, but they feel more like rehashes than homages. Much like South Park: The Stick of Truth, the look and style of the game is absolutely spot-on, it definitely feels like playing a Cyanide & Happiness cartoon.
With such a solid base of past successes in the board game, comic, and cartoon arenas there was a bit of disappointment in the overall lack of substance that Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse offers fans. It nails the classic point-and-click style but fails at just about everything else.
Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse: Part 1 is available on Steam for PC. Screen Rant was provided a PC code for the purposes of this review.