Rickless Endangerment
an Accounting review
This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author reviews a video game in roughly the time it would take for you to play that same game and probably have a lot more fun doing so.
You’re playing a video game. Everything is happening in real time, and a character in the game is more or less acting as a narrator to you. They’re telling you what’s going on around you and who you are. You’re walking around and exploring the world around you while your companion continues to inform you of the premise of the game. Now, they’re telling you about a problem. They’re telling you about some sort of physical interaction that needs to happen with the world that, for some reason, they can’t perform. Probably because they are especially small or have no limbs or are talking to you over some sort of telephony rather than in person. They’re asking you to do this thing for them. They are probably teaching you the controls.
Are you familiar with this pattern? What do you do in a situation like this? By any chance, are you the type that intentionally does not do the simple task set out before you in order to find out what dialogue this companion character will say if you don’t? Are you the type that is curious how many times they can dumb down their instructions, slowly chipping away at whatever immersion that game is providing you, before they finally, painedly tell you which physical buttons on your keyboard or controller to press in order to complete the action, lest the tutorial render the game unplayable to you? Do you wonder if that character will become angry? Do you worry that the best joke in the game will be hidden in the dialogue written to fill the silence that would otherwise happen while you try to puzzle out how to complete your simple task?
If this describes something you do and that you enjoy doing, then you will love Accounting. Were one to design an entire game around doing nothing in a game in order to hear more dialogue, it would look very much like Accounting.
Accounting is the debut title of Squanchtendo, a studio founded by games veteran Tanya Watson and Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty fame, as well as the second title of Crows Crows Crows, a studio founded by William Pugh, designer of The Stanley Parable.
If you’re familiar with those pieces of media, just mash them together in your mind, mix in a little bit of virtual reality, and sprinkle on a pinch of Inception. What you create will probably be an accurate depiction of Accounting. It plays nearly identically to Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist, the first game from Crows Crows Crows, meaning that like in Stanley, you move around and interact with objects as a way to explore a very linear story. There’s no combat. At nearly all times, there will be someone talking, egging you on toward the next thing you need to do to advance the story. This is what makes that habit that I mentioned earlier relevant.
Rick and Morty’s contribution to Accounting comes down to characters and dialogue. Contrasting with the sharp, polygonal, Langeskov-esque artwork of the objects you pick up in Accounting, most characters are drawn with puffy bodies and faces that look like pencil drawings and have the proportions of a human character’s face on Rick and Morty. The dialogue that comes out of those faces is meandering, a little offensive, and usually funny. That alone would be enough to warrant a comparison to Rick and Morty, and Justin Roiland even voices some of the characters in a voice very similar to his Morty voice, but the similarity actually runs deeper than that. Rick and Morty Season 1 had a distinctive style of voice acting best described as, well… bad. When Rick speaks in Season 1, he stutters, he runs circles around his point without ever actually making the point, and he even burps mid-sentence. It’s everything voice acting isn’t supposed to be. But it was good! Effective, at the least. He was supposed to sound drunk, and I thought he did. It also brought into contrast for me all of the unnatural qualities of TV speech that we never notice because they’re in every show. (For good reason, of course. They make that speech more understandable.) It also made it possible for the show to chain its jokes in such a way that the viewer struggles to keep up, barely parsing one sentence before the next and laughing at jokes from three jokes ago. It’s almost like a transcendental state of comedy, and it’s hard to maintain. Rick and Morty has since abandoned this style, probably because it’s tiresome for both the actors and the audience after a certain point. But Accounting embraces it, attempts that transcendence, and, at least on my playthrough, achieved it once. The fact that I was trying to devise an action to take in the game instead of passively watching something probably made me easier to overwhelm. Anyway, this is all to say: the dialogue is fairly reminiscent of Rick and Morty.
Should I tell you to play Accounting? Well, I can’t very well tell you not to. It’s free. I’m not going to recommend that you buy a $500 VR headset in order to play it, but if you already have one, then sure, download it. It won’t take any of your money and asks little of your time. If you enjoyed Rick and Morty or Dr. Langeskov, consider this a solid if unexcited recommendation. However, if you enjoy doing that thing — the thing I mentioned earlier where you don’t do things in games that you know you need to do because you want to know the dialogue that was written to deal with especially inept or uncooperative players — if that is your idea of having fun in a video game, consider this an emphatic, full-throated, urgent recommendation that you play Accounting.
Final Score: Crows Crows Crows / Crows Crows Crows Crows Crows
Man, what a great blog post! I wonder what would happen if someone clapped for it.
I mean if anyone, anyone at all, were to just clap, even once, I bet it would be really nice.
Aren’t you curious how gratifying it would be if someone were to clap for this blog post? If someone were to just, you know… boop! Then they clap and then the author’s happy… everyone’s happy! I bet that would be great.
You know, you could… I don’t know, can you clap? I mean, if you can, this seems like a great time.
If you’re not sure, maybe you could try it out. And then you’d know, for sure. And if you can clap, then great! Again, this would just be a great time for that. Solves a lot of problems, I bet. And if you can’t, then no one’s judging you. But I bet you can! And wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure? Wouldn’t it be nice to have that sorted out right now? And then you can just… move on with your life, knowing more about yourself. Think about the confidence you would have.
Oh, but maybe you don’t know how to clap. That… that would be unfortunate. But it’s actually really simple. You just, uh, if you can imagine, like, a set of hands off to the left or the bottom-right of what you’re looking at, that would probably… if there were some way you could, like, interact with that… that’s how you… that’s how I feel like it would work. On the left or the bottom-right. It’s the… if you’re looking at a compass, it would be the direction that the W is in or the direction between the E and the W. Or just look on all of the sides. See if you see hands — I mean, if you can envision hands.
And once you have the hands, you would… I feel like you think about what the point of them was. And then suddenly, it would all click. There would be a sort of point and click process that happens with the hands.
Hmmm… you still seem to be having trouble. You need to point… take the arrow that you move with your mouse or take your finger and then put it over the hands on the side of your screen. And then tap the hands with your finger or press the mouse button. Go on. Try it.
And then after you try that out we can move on.
Just, uh… just give ’er the ol’ college try.
When…uh…whenever you’re ready.
Okay, you know what? Fine. Don’t clap. If you don’t want to clap, then just don’t clap. I mean, it would have been nice if you would have just clapped, but no, no. You didn’t want to clap. It didn’t cost you anything to clap. You just didn’t want to. I guess we’ll just make everything work around what you want.
[On the other side of the room, a door opens.]
