The holidays are now over, 2025 has already begun, and it’s already been a few years since the national-popular tradition of cinepanettone has disappeared, slowly but inexorably, like all pop culture trends that complete their tour around the public, and this is the case of comedy games. I’m not particularly disheartened by this, however, in general, on a cinematographic and serial level there is a bit of a trend that sees stand-up comedy at its peak and the classic sitcom, the one that was the terrain of Friends, The Office, Big Bang Theory, a little old-fashioned and incapable of being replaced by something equally iconic and dazzling (not that there is a lack of excellent genre series, but a “mass” one is missing).
In the mainstream we laugh a little less, you might say, but in video games we have never laughed as much as since the golden era of LucasArts and Sierra. On the indie side, above all, there is a new approach to video game humour, with titles whose gameplay is totally at the service of comedy, whether written, visual or interactive.
i trend coincide col ritorno di Ron Gilbert in Thimbleweed Park e Return to Monkey Island
The fact that this trend coincides with Ron Gilbert’s return to the stage is a symptom not only of his newfound creative streak, with Thimbleweed Park first and Return to Monkey Island then, but of an environment and a market that has become welcoming again towards this type of production. Striking in this sense was Untitled Goose Game, a true video game case of 2019, winner of the Game of the Year award at the Game Developers Choice Award and a meme machine that still crowds social media today; simple but super effective in putting the player in the shoes of a goose and pushing him to play pranks on anyone, transforming us into the protagonist actors with great naturalness and pure fun.
THE BEAUTY OF COMEDY GAMES
English title with a very British humour, exactly like the game that pushed me to write this piece, the recent Thank Goodness You’re Here by Coal Supper, played during these holidays. A sort of South Park of the British suburbs, vulgar, absurd, crazy (as well as having a spectacular visual style), capable of using clichés in a brilliant way and making people laugh out loud for the 3-4 hours it lasts, managing the times comedians in an almost perfect way.
The fact that it is a great platformer should not obscure the extraordinarily comedic, absolutely non-secondary nature of Super Mario Bros. Wonder! Each level is a sketch, a scene full of funny faces, comic psychedelia and surprises collected from a bottomless barrel of creativity.
the game that inspired me to write this piece, the recent Thank Goodness You’re Here by Coal Supper
A game created with the aim of making people laugh, succeeding in doing so like the best Mario & Luigi and WarioWare, to stay on the Nintendo theme. What if Death goes into burnout from too much work and has to bring his subordinates back into line, who go around the earth killing victims without criteria? This is the twist that gives Magic Design Studios’ depiction of the afterlife in Have a Nice Death a personality all its own. A very nice action-roguelite with an important social theme, such as stress in the workplace, represented between the serious and the facetious with great taste. The dialogues are brilliant, the slightly Burton-esque atmosphere is immediately captivating and the characters that populate the floors of Death Inc. are amazing (all thanks also to an excellent Italian translation!).
However, everything is nice, but a bombastic flatulence placed at the right time remains the ground zero of comedy and Yaza Games knows this well, given that it has built a very tasty strategy game like Inkulinati around it. Humor in Renaissance style, two scribes who challenge each other in battles as tasty as they are ridiculous, an indefinite quantity of ink to draw little animals who will not hesitate to show their butts to their opponents to inflict altered statuses. A little gem.
IT’S ALL ABOUT HUMOR
Going back to 2019, a fantastic example of a comedy game is certainly Later Alligator, a laugh-out-loud noir in a New York populated by alligators, where you have to help a slightly paranoid character understand what his family (a little mafia-like) is planning , according to him): whether it’s his birthday party or a “party” that will see him end up sleeping with the fish. It goes without saying that we will meet absurd relatives who will give us crazy tasks to unravel a bit and give us some clues, in minigames inspired by WarioWare, always different and hilarious. 
I conclude with what is instead a true romantic comedy in graphic adventure format, Half-Past Fate; a more unique than rare genre, in videogame form, which manages, with good writing and an exciting plot, to tell the amusing vicissitudes of a couple of a cast of very heterogeneous protagonists. A decidedly feel-good choral tale. Comedy games are not a genre, they are a mood that can be applied, as we have seen, to different types of gameplay. Maybe they aren’t the new sitcoms yet, but they could become one soon.
I conclude with what is instead a true romantic comedy in graphic adventure format, Half-Past Fate
I have brought you some, in my opinion, winning approaches, which manage to not only make you laugh (which is already very complicated in itself), but do so while also managing to build some nice pad games in hand. A trend that I hope can grow and evolve, perhaps bringing even more “heavy” titles to the market and I kind of see an interactive sitcom in the future in the wake of Supermassive Games-style horror films, from Until Dawn to The Quarry. I’m sure it could work well, if developed by the right studio, maybe by them or Don’t Nod…
Previous article
Antica Libreria TGM #24: Curious Video Game Machines, in search of lost machines
