Immature. Offensive. Hysterical. South Park: The Stick of Truth is not only a hilarious and entertaining game but also an extremely intelligent and witty satire of fantasy role-playing tropes.
Developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by UbiSoft, it's a 2-D role-playing game based on Trey Parker and Matt Stone's animated series South Park. The player controls the New Kid as he explores the fictional Colorado town of South Park. At the beginning of the game, the player selects one of four character archetypes: Fighter, Thief, Mage (which all represent standard fantasy classes) and, in classic South Park fashion, a brand-new, offensive one: Jew. Each class has its own specific abilities. The Jew class, for example, utilizes "Jew-jitsu" and long-range attacks.
Notable characters from the Comedy Central series — including Cartman, Butters, Stan and Kyle — join the New Kid and accompany him on quests, battling Gingers, aliens, Nazi zombies and even Al Gore.
The game features a fast travel system, allowing the player to call on Timmy to quickly transport them to fast travel stations around South Park. The New Kid and his allies possess a variety of melee, ranged and magic attacks. Like other role-playing games, experience points are rewarded for completing tasks and winning battles, and allow you to level up and unlock new abilities and upgrades.
Like the series, South Park: The Stick of Truth includes tons of mature humor and sexual material. One sequence depicts space aliens anally probing Randy, Stan's dad. Later in the game, the New Kid sneaks into an abortion clinic and uses a vacuum to perform an abortion on him. An entire level of the game takes place inside Mr. Slave's rectum, with the New Kid navigating a maze of sex toys, dead animals and random objects.
There's a lot of nudity, too. Breasts, buttocks and penises are occasionally on display. One extended boss battle features an out-of-focus couple (your character's parents) having sex in the background. You'll be forced to engage in turn-based battle in the foreground, dodging a swinging scrotum while performing melee and magic attacks.
Development of South Park: The Stick of Truth began in 2009, when Parker and Stone contacted Obsidian Entertainment to discuss their desire to make a South Park game. Parker and Stone were involved throughout the game's production, writing its script, consulting on the design and voicing many of the characters (as they do on the show). The result is the most authentic South Park experience possible. The game's presentation flawlessly captures the crude, construction-paper cut-out style of the series and every location is painstakingly recreated and packed with in-jokes.
You're essentially playing a 14-hour episode of South Park here. This is a quality role-playing game in its own right, but it's made even better by the top-notch writing from Parker and Stone. There are references to games like BioShock and Skyrim throughout, with your character listening to random audio files, looting treasure chests (and dead bodies) and even performing a fart-based version of a "dragon shout."
South Park: The Stick of Truth is funny, shocking and absolutely ridiculous — a fitting send-up of gaming and geek culture that's as entertaining as it is offensive.
(South Park: The Stick of Truth is available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It's rated M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Mature Humor, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Violence.)
