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It was somewhere around the time we were having a microtrip through technicolour tunnels that made us levitate that my friend said, "WE SHOULDN'T HAVE EATEN THAT PIG." My character bouncing around off fluorescent triangles, mangling my hand on WASD, I said "I'M GETTING NAUSEOUS," and she pointed to some microchips on a floor made of formulae and greek symbols and I put the chips in the computer's head. The next sick-making tunnel opened before me.We were a long way from the twee game we thought we were playing. We'd scanned the barcode printed on the pig-on-wheels into her phone, her real-life phone, before our character ate it, and it gave us a message that suggested that Agent Polyblank shouldn't eat the electric pig. So, we made Polyblank eat the electric pig. A hole opened in the grass verge and we descended into the darkly comedic belly of Jazzpunk.
Initially, you think Jazzpunk is some sort of kitsch hat-tip to Cold War politics, a beautifully stylish Man From UNCLE pastiche. It's sort of like being in the opening credits to Cowboy Bebop at first. Jazzpunk describes itself as a 'comedy adventure', but it's as much a classic affirmation of the great wide imagination of the human mind and all the ridiculous things it can make happen squeezed into the skin of a first-person adventure game. It's a homage to those 3AM stints you played when you were younger, when you thought the colours were frazzling your brain and you put your hand to your eyes to stave off the brightness of digital colours.
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