Jazzpunk’s spy spoof still lands because it never explains the joke

Jazzpunk is a first-person adventure game about a spy who gets mailed to work in a suitcase. Necrophone Games developed it. Adult Swim Games published it. It came out in February 2014 for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux, and it is one of the funniest things the indie scene produced that decade.

Trailer, via GOG.

Polyblank arrives in a human-shaped suitcase

You play Polyblank, a silent protagonist. The game opens with him delivered by post to a top-secret espionage agency that operates out of an abandoned subway station. The setting is a fictional place called Japanada in the late 1950s, an alternate reality where the Empire of Japan conquered most of North America. The tone is surreal retro-futurism, and Jazzpunk never explains any of it.

The Director hands out the missions. Each one starts the same way, with Polyblank taking a dose of prescription medicine. Each one ends with him on a bench in a Zen garden, feeding breadcrumbs to Koi fish. That loop is the spine of the whole thing.

Degaussing pigeons, stealing a kidney, photocopying a bottom

The tasks are nonsense on purpose. Polyblank degausses and smuggles pigeons. He cross-dresses. He kills a pig with a guitar. He photocopies his own buttocks to fool a security scanner, though you can also pull a photo off the wall instead.

Mission one sends him into a Soviet consulate to recover a data cartridge. Mission two sends him to a sushi restaurant to steal a cowboy’s artificial kidney. On the way back, agents intercept him and demand he “hand over the wetware.” He escapes.

Then the Director tells him to take a holiday while things die down. At the Kai Tak resort, a phone call orders Polyblank to find a man called The Editor and switch briefcases with him. He pulls it off, drinks a cocktail, and passes out.

The resort is a simulation and the pig is mechanical

Polyblank wakes in a hotel room at night with a note directing him to the rear pool. There he meets a man who tells him the resort is a simulation. The only way out is to find, kill and cook the mechanical pig that circuits the hotel. After that and an electric maze, he is back in the subway station.

He finds the Director and his secretary reduced to cardboard cutouts. An audio message from the Editor says that if Polyblank wants to see them again, he should come to his house. There, Polyblank must beat the Editor at a game of sport to free the Director. He loses. So he collects prizes instead, inflating the Editor’s ego until he can pop him with a needle.

He finds the Director and a button to press. Whichever one Polyblank presses, the Director turns into a crocodile and eats Polyblank. The credits roll inside the Director’s intestines. Polyblank is given special tablets to help him get out, and the game ends when he takes the pills.

Mini-golf, Frogger and a toaster full of bread

Jazzpunk is not built around puzzle-solving. It is built around exploration and comedy, and each mission has one central objective while the world stays open for you to wander. The NPCs are the point. Almost every one has an action or a gag attached.

The mini-games are the best argument for the game, and they rank among its sharpest ideas. The game features:

1. “Wedding Qake,” later renamed “Wedding Cake” — a Quake deathmatch-style contest fought with wedding-themed weapons: cake, roses, champagne corks.
2. The Duck Hunt variant — you pelt cardboard ducks with slices of bread fired from a toaster.
3. The Frogger clone.
4. Mini-golf.

That first one is the whole game in miniature. Jazzpunk takes a familiar piece of game history, swaps the ammunition for something absurd, and lets the joke land without a wink.

The director’s cut matters here. Necrophone self-published it for the PlayStation 4 in September 2016, then brought it to personal computer platforms in June 2017. Anyone arriving late got the fuller version.

What holds up is the restraint underneath the silliness. Jazzpunk could have been a pile of references with no through-line. Instead it commits to a structure: the medicine, the mission, the Zen garden, the Koi. The repetition is what makes the ending work. The Director becoming a crocodile and eating you is not a twist the game earns through plot. It earns it by making you trust a routine for three hours and then breaking it.

The weaknesses are real but minor. The comedy carries more weight than the mechanics, and players who want their adventure games to push back will find little resistance here. Jazzpunk is short, and it is not difficult.

The score is 8.3/10.

Adult Swim Games · adventure games · comedy games · Indie Games · Jazzpunk · Necrophone Games