Animalia

These Heterogenous Tasks

Animalia is a game in which you play four forest creatures who are trying to cover up the ritual sacrifice of a small child by piloting a replica of that small child. You get to choose which animals control the head, arms, torso and legs; some of them are more inept than others, but the sum effect is always a big mess. It is a very silly game, and genuinely funny.

Wacky is a difficult thing to pull off. Surprise is a big element of comedy, and particularly so in wacky comedy – if a particular approach to wackiness becomes familiar and predictable, it has nothing going for it at all. And Animalia is doing a slight spin on a very well-trodden schtick. It’s part of a vast family of jokes – There’s Something Wrong About This Dude, And We’ve Got To Hide That. Octodad, QWOP. Every Weekend at Bernie’s corpse gag, every three-small-children-in-a-big-trenchcoat bit, every thing where aliens attempt to pass as human. There are two jokes in this scenario: the impostor being bad at imposting, and how their marks manage to buy it anyway. (In this case, because kids are weird and Charlie was a weird kid in the first place).

But it doesn’t feel like a tired retread of something we’ve seen a million times. It manages to pull off quite a lot of physical slapstick despite being all-text; it does just as well with the squad’s disastrous social efforts and internal conflicts. I don’t have a lot of useful analysis about how it manages this, except for the rather unilluminating explanation of Good Writing. There’s not a lot of space in wacky comedy between ‘painfully tedious’ and ‘really good’ – either the joke lands or you die – but Animalia lands it.