Developer Jean-Baptise de Clerfayt's new point-and-click adventure game Lancelot's Hangover is a crass but oddly charming romp through medieval Europe. The environmental puzzles are fairly clever, and Lancelot's Hangover rarely suffers from the typical "click everything on the screen until something happens" issue that many illogical point-and-click games devolve into. The humor can be a little ostentatious or outdated, but it mostly serves the game very well, creating an intriguing experience overall.
Players begin Lancelot's Hangover by being dropped in the shoes of the titular Lancelot after he wakes up in the woods half-naked because of a raging party the night before. Lancelot, as one of the Knights of the Round Table, is then called upon by God himself to locate the Holy Grail somewhere in France. There is no noble reason for this though, as instead Lancelot is supposed to fill the Grail with booze and use it to throw the largest party that the world has ever experienced. This journey will take players all around a fictionally hilarious form of France that includes a suspiciously Disney-esque theme park, a desolate village full of dirty peasants, and a city hiding the secret laboratory of a local witch (or scientist, as she refers to herself).
Gameplay is pretty standard for point-and-click games. Lancelot's Hangover tasks players with tracking down different objects in the world and using them to gain other objects from characters or pass environmental obstacles. Many of these items can be combined together to create methods of solving more complicated puzzles. One of the more interesting problems tasks players with combining party drugs in the witch's lab in order to create a hallucinogen that allows them to traverse a maze-like forest better than they could sober, and that's a microcosm of the game's approach to humor and design all-in-one.
The different environments of the game are a joy to explore, and as Lancelot's Hangover progresses they are altered or open up in some really interesting ways. Redemption Land (the previously mentioned theme park) must be revisited several times throughout the game, and each time players are able to explore different aspects of the park. It's fun to see the little jabs in this park about commercialism - and Disney specifically.
One of the best aspects of Lancelot's Hangover is how it handles giving hints for these puzzles and their environments. Rather than having a hint button or a "hotspot" indicator to find hidden objects, hints are all a part of conversations with characters or Lancelot's own internal dialogue. The answers to these puzzles are never given outright, but players can ask pretty much any character in the game about how to find a specific object, and those characters can easily point a lost player in the correct direction. Lancelot himself will occasionally offer up hints by saying things like "I bet I can do this specific thing with this specific object" or "I bet this character knows something about this thing," which really helps put players on the right track.
The humor in Lancelot's Hangover can be a lot of fun, but it can also be pretty juvenile at times. There are a lot of fart jokes and outdated jokes about sex and sexuality that are outright offensive in their approach. Some of the jokes feel like they wouldn't be out of place in an episode of South Park from the early 2000s, but others still are very solid. The slapstick and animation-style humor in particular is very strong in Lancelot's Hangover, and even the way that characters move is pretty hilarious.
Other than its sometimes outdated humor, the only issues that players will really have with Lancelot's Hangover is its very bizarre choice of a cursor in-game. The pointer is a large cross that is about half an inch tall, with no indication of which part of the cursor actually clicks on objects. This can be very frustrating when trying to click on specific objects on-screen or in the inventory. This may seem kind of minor, but in a game all about clicking this can get old very fast.
Lancelot's Hangover isn't particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary for the point-and-click genre, but it does a great job of incorporating it with a bizarre sense of humor. The world is a joy to explore, and all of the game's puzzles are satisfying, and Lancelot's Hangover should be a great experience for any fans of point-and-click games.
Lancelot's Hangover can be played on PC. A Steam code was provided for the purposes of this review.
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