What if fighting games were meant to be high-class affairs?
What if selectable characters were straight out of popular movies and the battles took place on the sets?
What if we launched Yo Mama jokes instead of fists?
What if successful combos meant arranging refrigerator poetry magnets into somewhat coherent statements?
What if a fighter’s weakness was his manhood, but not his, uh, manhood?
What if comebacks were the greatest finishing moves of all?
All of these very serious questions are answered in Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast, the new game from developer Vile Monarch.
A spinoff of the popular Oh…Sir! insult game, Roast tasks us with winning 1v1 battles of vocal wit, not physicality. We select our character from film-inspired sources (a Gandalf clone, a mix between Harry Potter and Dirty Harry, etc) and square-off with movie sets as the backdrop. From a menu of insults in the middle, we select various nouns and verbs to form sentences, launching them at our foe. The more on-the-nose they are (go after someone’s manliness, for instance) the more damage they do. A new “charged comeback” feature acts a bit like a finishing move, where we store up power over our selections and drop a big, nasty taunt that could significantly reduce out opponent’s health.
It’s a simple as that.
While it’s designed to look like an arcade fighter, it really plays out more like a tabletop party game, and fits alongside Cards Against Humanity in its focus on pulling meaning from randomness. Both players pull from the same pool of insults, but also get a limited personal selection as well, forcing everyone to get creative and think a couple of steps ahead for coherent sentences. If we create something really funny, the unexpected PAX East crowd behind us (the one that saw the goofiness of the game and began collecting nearby) to burst out laughing.
I have a feeling that the next time I have a group of friends over for whiskey, this is going to be a natural fit.
Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast arrives this Spring to mobile and PC.
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