It's a very old dance with a merry old sound"
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Slow Cheetah
I miss keeping dungeons, so thanks to some sale or another I've been giving Dungeons 2 a chance. It's... quaint. Decidedly less creative than the classic it copycats but possibly worth buying on sale for those of us whose imp-slapping hand has been itching lately.
I also tried to finish Fallout 2 and ended up uninstalling it just as I did back in the 2000s of yore, and at about the same early point, which is to say the point where you run a mission for a ghost. No effort was put into justifying the ghost, no techno wizardry, no machines for said ghost to shell, not even a Scooby Doo rubber mask. You're just walking through a post-nuclear wasteland and there's a ghost, imbued with all the narrative logic of a third grader's first attempts at storytelling. Note that Fallout, despite its retro Cold War stylings, was still nominally a Science Fiction universe.
Of course anyone who played Fallout 2 will tell you that's just the tip of the iceberg. Where the original indulged in a few Mad Max or '90s television references, it nevertheless held together its post-apocalyptic setting. The sequel, on the other hand, buried its core appeal in endless nonsensical pop culture asides, characters with the personality of online gamers and throwaway gags. It reeked of a rushed, uninspired attempt at cashing in on a profitable intellectual property. So it's interesting that the same routine bothers me much less in Dungeons 2.
After all, its highly unreliable narrator doesn't seem to have heard of a fourth wall and half the commentary during your missions consists of references to obscure late-2000s internet memes or personae. And, while it was cute when Philip K. Dick was doing it fifty years ago, "going meta" has long since passed into fanfiction kitsch. On the other hand, Dungeons 2 never really pretends to be anything more than kitschy fanfiction of Dungeon Keeper. It more sucessfully manages it audience's expectations than did Fallout 2. Also, while the commentary and creature names routinely shatter the fourth wall, they don't impinge on the main action of the game, which is still that of goblins and demons killing all hu-mons. You can safely ignore the narrator's blathering about the banking industry and simply send your orcs to axe down a unicorn. Substance may still be found beneath the derision.
There is a difference between telling a joke and being a joke. While old-school comedians could sometimes trip into this pitfall, it's become a particular failing of new media in teh internets age. Creators of the past three decades have increasingly drawn upon the frame of reference of online forums and social media, which heavily encourage one and all to play a socially acceptable brand of fool for each particular microenvironment, to engage in a sort of "folie en famille" considered all the more endearing for its predictability. We are all each others' joke in an online echo chamber.
Yet when selling a product, even the most niche-oriented, you are invariably attempting to reach people who are not already in on the joke, and over-playing the ironic detachment can rapidly cause your audience to question why they're listening to you demonstrate how hard you don't give a shit. It's an issue I've repeatedly addressed here both for webcomics like The Order of the Stick and for RPGs like Wasteland 2 or Divinity: Original Sin. Tossing in a mission called "Occupy Wall Street" could easily have made Dungeons 2 as incongruous as the ghost in a post-nuclear desert. But as you sit back and listen to the narrator bullshit his way through paragraph after paragraph of in-universe justification, you feel less and less cheated out your fantasy narrative, less like a joke is being played on you as a customer, and more like you're in on a joke being told by the entertainers you've hired. It comes down to the difference between Jan Jansen and Grobnar Gnomehands: even a fool must own his folly.
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