![]() Thankfully the turn-based combat cuts into the childish dialogues and offers a challenge worthy of the genre. In the first hour, you will be able to smile at them even if they reek of being cheesy, but later on, they just become tiresome and lame. Unfortunately just as the tower does not live up to the expectations of a grandiose quest, the humor is also rather boorish with uninspired jokes and parodies. The commonplaces of the fantasy universe are combined with quirks of the modern world, the result being an ironical, almost cynical view of games like Baldur’s Gate or books like Lord of the Rings. Instead of ancient challenges dreamt up by a dungeon master, they will have to navigate the bureaucratic maze of the procedures put in place by a co-op syndicate. Just as in the writings of Lang, our heroes are never prepared to face what the game throws at them. Of course in the end the adventure will be anything but straightforward, the developers putting in place a lot of detours and parodical side quests. The quest is simple: explore the tower of Naheulbeuk and track down a mysterious statue, tied to an ancient prophecy. When you get everyone together you will be challenged to explore the different levels of the Naheulbeuk tower. It all starts with a party of adventurers, reduced to the most basic stereotypes: a bawdy ranger, an arcanely challenged magician, an always hungry ogre, a pretty but empty-headed elf archer, an always cranky dwarf, a cowardly thief, and a barbarian that looks more like Schwarzenegger than the actor himself.Īfter going through the painfully overstretched tutorial you can choose one more character to accompany you in the dungeons: the annoyingly narcissistic bard, the short-tempered paladin, or the salacious priest. The new console version is set to inflict even deeper wounds in the heart of the fans. Despite the renowned actors and a checklist of features that sound good in theory, the video game does not manage to surpass the level of high school humor. The PC version released last year followed in the footsteps of The Bard’s Tale, being a collection of cheap shots gathered in a AA game, rather than a well-thought-out parody of the genre. ![]() The humor of the author is as far from stylish and elegant as is a lightsaber from the Star Trek Universe. After being adapted into novels, comic books and being translated to English, a video game adaptation was inevitable. John Lang arguably managed to achieve this precarious balance with his audiobook series called The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. ![]() ![]() It is really hard to walk the thin line of making fun of all the major books and games while maintaining a sense of humor that does not appear childish or second-hand. It is not easy to make a parody targeting the fantasy fans out there. The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos is a tongue twister for sure but what else is it? An RPG? A turn-based tactics game? A bad parody? A collection of cheap shots aimed at the most iconic fantasy novels and best-known characters from other video games? Actually, the game is a bit of everything, but while it tries to be a jack of all trades it misses to achieve anything meaningful or truly memorable.
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