I don't know any other games that late you play as a black Israelite, so that's already a selling point. I was like the Malcom X/Malik Shabazz of Judaism, giving up on black supremacy to join unified Judaism after Cartman told me not to let him Jewwash me.

Anyway, the game perfectly replicates the artstyle of the show, has lots of funny jokes, does a great job of letting you explore the South Park world and has a cool combat system. The problem I have with many turn based games is you don't have agency for so much of it, relying on dice rolls to see if you hit, how much damage you do, etc etc, in Stick of Truth basically every attack has a quick time event that decides hitting and damage rates, and good timing lets you block enemy attacks, reducing or totally stopping damage.

Automatically healing your health and ability points after a fight also makes it avoid being draining. It gets very easy though, I rarely died and by the late game I could easily just spam highly powerful attacks to curb stomp any non boss enemy and drain bosses. Still though, the variety of companions with their own abilities you get throughout the story and the abilities you unlock for your own class as you progress keeps things fresh until the last quarter of the game or so.

Some minor issues like bugs with the music dropping out, annoying tutorials that force you to rewatch them if you fail an attempt, and moments where the game doesn't do a good job showing of which ability you need to use to progress, but nothing too noteworthy. The game is also quite short, I got 11 hours out of it but that was while doing almost all of the side missions, minibosses and a bunch of optional fights, you can beat the game in a lot quicker if you just ignore that and focus on the main quest.

So I'd say it's really fun and well made, but £26 for a short game that's older than its main character is a bit much. Buy, but buy on sale.

I climbed inside of a gay man's ass and performed an abortion on a thermobaric nuclear warhead while the Catatafish attempted to groom me 10/10 felt just like an episode of the show.

Matt and Trey sat down and made the South Park game that South Park fans actually deserved after years of mediocre licensed attempts, and the result is one of the funniest RPGs ever made by a pretty comfortable margin.

The key thing Obsidian understood going in, and credit to them for respecting the source material enough to get this right, is that the humor only works if the game itself is competent. A bad game with South Park jokes is just a bad game. A genuinely well constructed RPG with South Park jokes is Stick of Truth, and the turn based combat, the character progression, the way the world is laid out, all of it holds up on its own terms before you factor in a single fart joke.

And then you factor in the fart jokes and everything else and it becomes something else entirely.

The writing is indistinguishable from the show at its best. Matt and Trey were hands on in a way that licensed games almost never get and you can feel that throughout. Every side quest, every throwaway NPC interaction, every completely unhinged plot development feels like it belongs in an actual episode rather than a game trying to approximate one.

The ending goes places that you genuinely do not see coming even accounting for everything that came before it, which for a game this relentlessly absurd is an achievement in itself.

Obsidian's fingerprints on the RPG systems are visible throughout and that pedigree matters. Steam Deck runs it beautifully. One of the rare licensed games that earns its existence completely.