“Pssst! Hey kid… Want to go on an adventure?” asks the store-page for The Edge Of Allegoria, an upcoming Game Boy-styled retro RPG. It might look like an old Pokemon game (and play like one, too, minus the creature collecting part), but this one’s for GROWN UPS. Or at least teenagers discovering the siren song of games with swearing and the occasional (very) pixelated boob. The store page does promise “Nudity and Sexual Content, Pervasive Coarse Language, Alcohol and Drug Use”, after all.
See, the ‘Edge’ here in Edge Of Allegoria seems very literal. This is, at first blush, a crude parody of classic Game Boy RPGs, right down to a world broken up into Pokemon-style ‘routes’ and a very familiar combat engine, but with more than a little swearing, and casual use of joints as consumables. The stakes seem a little higher here, with rampaging monsters threatening to destroy towns, and some kind of ancient demonic force in the backdrop stirring up trouble, but the player character—a dungaree-clad country bumpkin named Joe—doesn’t seem particularly interested in it. He just wants to fish. And fight.
