Booting up The Procession to Calvary for the first time will give players several conflicting impressions. While the game's environment is made up of beautiful renaissance era paintings, the humor is so immature that it would not be out of place in an episode of South Park. The combination of classic paintings and grotesque humor is at odds with itself for the entirety of the game, but this conflict makes The Procession to Calvary that much more enjoyable and hilarious.
It is impossible not to find the environment of The Procession to Calvary beautiful, as it is full of some of the most well known paintings in human history. The developer, Joe Richardson (creator of the critically acclaimed Four Last Things), basically cut and pasted people from these paintings to use as characters in his game. This means that all of the movements and actions of characters are erratic and completely two dimensional. This adds to the humor, as the protagonist runs around the environment in an intentionally unnatural way.
The gameplay of The Procession to Calvary is actually a simple point and click adventure. Those familiar with the genre will find all the traditional actions and mechanics. Players will be tasked with speaking to NPCs and picking up objects to solve puzzles. Some of these objects must be combined with others to solve more complicated scenarios. The Procession to Calvary doesn't alter the formula for point and click adventure games, but the puzzles are satisfying to solve and make sense logically. The puzzles do grow more complicated as time goes on, but it is easy to follow the logic of each quest.
Some mechanics are introduced that shake up the gameplay a little, and the most fun is the protagonist's sword. There are a few puzzles that are only solvable by a quick stab or slash of the sword, but they're few and far between. Where the sword truly shines in The Procession to Calvary is its ability to murder any NPC that the player encounters. If the player finds themselves stuck on a particularly tough puzzle, they can just murder the appropriate character to obtain the object they need. There are serious repercussions to killing anyone, but discovering them is half the fun of The Procession to Calvary.
The humor is the most important aspect of The Procession to Calvary, and for the most part it sticks the landing. All the jokes are dark and/or immature, yet in such a pretty game the absurdity makes them wonderfully silly. Some players may find a few of the jokes in poor taste though or a little too obvious to be funny. For example, a few of the jokes about the Catholic church's history of pedophilia feel outdated. This goes the same with a lot of the fourth wall breaking jokes, in which the developer appears as God. These jokes just wind up falling flat. Most of the time The Procession to Calvary manages to be surrealistically funny by finding a way to make things like crucifixions and other forms of torture seem silly.
The Procession to Calvary is an odd game that caters to a specific audience thanks to the humor, which while immature, still takes inspiration from surrealist masterpieces like Monty Python's The Holy Grail. These comedy styles combined with the game's unique animation ultimately blend well to create a wonderful, if short, gaming experience. Those who enjoy dark humor and point and click adventure games will surely have a great time with The Procession to Calvary.
The Procession to Calvary can be played on PC. A Steam code was provided for the purposes of this review.