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Absurd Ventures, the game and creative studio started by Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser back in 2021, has shown a first-look image of characters from its upcoming Absurdaverse setting, and announced an in-development game set there.
“A very first look at just a few characters from the ABSURDAVERSE. Prepare to meet some new kinds of heroes (and watch them suffer). More information to come this year about the first animation projects and about our original story-driven action-comedy adventure game set in the Absurdaverse, now in development at Absurd Ventures,” says the announcement post.
I’m not entirely sure what that genre is, to be frank. “Action-comedy adventure” is so broad a genre that it could be God of War (but funny), or it could be that shooter the Rick and Morty people did. Knowing Houser’s past work, though, we can know that the core will be the laughs. The only thing we can reliably draw from the image is a mix of fantasy tropes and modern-day people—skeleton dude and businessman next to each other. That’s about it.
For my part, those character drawings are aggressively stock-stereotype-comedy-coded. They’re ridiculously generic to the point that I can tell the primary joke for every character just looking at it—annoying kid, small guy who is fit, plus-size woman, diversity stereotype woman, barbarian, obnoxious trendy guy, competent-yet-ignored woman, annoying magician/inventor. I could go on, though I’m open to being surprised by the quality of whatever comes out. I’m just not betting, based on the title and on the image, that anything innovative is going to happen with whatever the “ABSURDAVERSE” ends up being.
To be frank, this looks like an almost transparent attempt to produce from zero a mass-marketable world to sell merch about. It just tastes commercial, rather than creative. Like a webseries from 2012 that got a single overfunded season and was subsequently cancelled. Hopefully for the sake of all those people from the Immortals of Aveum studio that now work at Absurd Ventures it’s better than that and I have to eat my words.
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Kurt Indovina
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