After trekking through the hefty games of Witcher 2 & 3 I needed something lighter to mix up the palette. Luckily I came across this "LucasArts adventure games" inspired point'n'click for $5 on GOG.

Irony Curtain proudly wears it's old school adventure game love on it's sleeve. The first thing you'll notice is the art style, which has a bit of a Curse of Monkey Island vibe with that Saturday Morning cartoon look. Well, in this case it's more early Internet flash comic, but still. The music also sounds like the type of scores you'd hear in a classic adventure game, with a little bit of a Russian flair given the USSR setting.

The puzzles in this game never get too moon logicy. I did have to use a walkthrough on a couple parts that got tedious, but even those difficult puzzles made some type of logical sense. The level set in the town square drags a bit as you get bounced around from person to person, each wanting a specific item.

Irony Curtain's humor is sort of hit and miss for me. The game feels like it bounces between being kid-friendly and adult-oriented. Towards the end the games starts using a lot more swear words which feels disconnected from the rest of the game that played it pretty PG. There's some absurdist, satire that gives a few snorts, like the overbearing bureaucracy of paperwork. It also suffers from the modern "comedy" curse of just making a reference to things and that's the whole joke; ex: "There's bottlecaps in this fallout bunker." Get it, huh, get it? One of my favorite jokes involves the big bad general that is always two steps behind you. All the NPCs you interact with get arrested by him and his goons. The joke is "You are under arrest! Major, read them their rights."
"You have no rights."

The story is a fun little romp. Taking place in an altered 1950s you play as Evan Kovolski, the college aged editor of his one man newspaper and a firm believer in Communism. You learn real quick Evan is very much that kid in college we all know who read Marx and thought Communism was the greatest thing ever, having never seen it in practice. At first, I thought I might dislike this game a bit because I was worried it would beat me over the head with how great Communism is. Well, after giving a speech on TV about Communism, Evan is drafted by a seductive spy to help stop an assassination of the fearless leader of a Soviet Bloc country. who bares an intentional resemblance to Stalin. Evan gets air dropped in and soon learns Communism isn't what it's all cracked up to be. Some of the humor comes from Evan's denial of the dismal reality of Matryoshka and trying to spin everything to fit his idea of the Communist paradise. As a red blooded American, I enjoyed the shots at the USSR and Communism in general. Again, it's handled with fun and satire, so it doesn't get too overbearing in the other direction as well. Surprisingly according to the credits most the people that worked on this game seem to be Russian or of Russian descent, so I guess this is self-depreciating humor.

The ending of the game comes soon enough, for a $5 game you can't expect a long playtime. It honestly gets more complex than it needs to be. So spoiler time. One of the first jokes is that your parents are obviously American spies, but they haven't told you and you don't think it's odd they know karate and stock an armory of guns. The game kinda ruins that joke by having the seductive spy explain to Evan that his parents are spies. You also learn that you were adopted and the general who's been pursuing you is your real twin brother and the fearless leader is your uncle. Your brother was the person who wanted to assassinate the leader and the spy you worked with is actually the leader of the resistance that wants to free Matryoshka from the iron rule of dictatorship. It's a lot of serious spy stuff for a comedy game, seems a bit overkill.

All in all, if you want a good little game that feels like an advanced version of the type of games you play for free on NotDoppler and enjoy getting the piss taken out of Commies, I'd recommend this game. It's short enough to be inoffensive.