Unconventional weapons, attacks, and enemies are often even funnier than story elements.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One is as grand and tongue-in-cheek as its title. The team behind popular webcomic Penny Arcade (www.penny-arcade.com) took off their critic hats to become creators, turning their sharp eyes for good game design into an engaging title. Episode One is packed with inside jokes, but even if you’ve never heard of the comic, the game’s sharp story, dialogue, and gameplay mechanics make it a must for adventure fans.

Tycho and Gabe, the comic’s protagonists, are always around, and you start the game by building your own character, forming a trio. A handful of body types, hairstyles, and clothing options allow you to build fairly unique personas, although we would have liked a touch more variety. The completed character matches the game’s bold, comic-book style, looking great running through the 3D world during gameplay or drawn in 2D side-view in the cutscenes. The absurdist, steampunk-influenced setting (think ornate, steam-powered mechanical objects from a Jules Verne story) gives you many opportunities to admire the view—for example, the game opens with a giant robotic fruit juicer tottering and clanking across the city.

Adventure scenes send your team on errand treks to retrieve objects. But a turn-based combat system provides the action. Your group of characters engages numerous, motley foes with basic attacks, super attacks, and about a dozen special items. In these frequent fights, players have to balance the extra kick of a super attack against the extra time it takes to charge one up. And unlike in a typical turn-based game, players always have some control over the action. Hit the spacebar at the right time to block an enemy and counterattack. Super attacks rely on minigames that last a few seconds—such as pressing other keys at the right moment—to dole out maximum damage.

The action perfectly matches the humor. Not to spoil anything, but here’s an example: Mimes attack with pantomimed movements and headings such as “Pretend I Have a Gun.” Some jokes miss, but everything incorporates humor—the settings, enemies, weapons, and storyline. And though the game might look like a cartoon to an uncritical parent, be sure to play it yourself before giving it to a child; much of the humor and coarse language is for adults, such as the obscene behavior of the aforementioned robot juicers.