Since playing Night in the Woods lately, I’ve been nostalgic about some of funnier video games I’ve played. I always enjoy when a game includes some humor — usually from a side character who cracks jokes, or something along those lines. But there are some games out there that are just about 100% funny. Even if you’re living through a story, getting to know characters in a deep way, shooting bad guys, or solving puzzles, the humor is an ever-present force that makes the game way more fun than it would otherwise be.
Here are the games that have had me laughing out loud the most.
Psychonauts
This was probably my first funny game. Made by the always-funny studio Double Fine, it’s a puzzle platformer adventure game (that’s surprisingly challenging, let me tell you!) about a bunch of students at a summer camp for kids with psychic abilities. There’s a pretty fun storyline to follow, but the best part of the game is how over-the-top the characters are. Teachers and fellow students alike are hilarious, and the game’s wacky levels are a perfect fit for its silly sense of humor.Saints Row IV
Saints Row games are known for being funny, and this is the main one that I played in the series. In the game, you get to create a character who is as over-the-top as you like, and then whisk them through a crazy action adventure that has you leaping like a superhero over rooftops, shooting people with a dubstep gun that makes everybody get down, fighting zombies, and more. The series is all about sarcasm and caricatures — it even parodies well-known games and movies like Mass Effect and The Matrix. I had a blast playing it, and the chaotic humor of the entire game’s design is what really sets it apart.
Tales from the Borderlands
Okay, so the entire Borderlands series from Gearbox is hilarious. Over-the-top villains with silly names and a wise-cracking robot are the culprits there. But I personally found Telltale’s video game, set in the Borderlands universe, the funniest of them all. You follow two characters here, a con-woman named Fiona and a corporate techie named Rhys, as they’re captured by bad guys and bicker through telling them the story of how they got there. The situational humor is great, but there are also jokes galore — a lot of them silly humor — that had me laughing out loud.
Night in the Woods
I’m in the middle of this narrative game, which came out earlier this year. It’s about a 20-year-old college dropout moving back home, trying to figure out her life. The kicker is that she and the rest of the town’s inhabitants are all woodland creatures. The humor is all dialogue-based, but it’s clever, a little off-center, and even funnier coming from a bunch of angsty teenage bears and raccoons.Portal
If you like dry humor, this is the game for you. A lot of people dig the more in-your-face humor (and action) of Portal 2, but I prefer the subtle, dry wit of the original game. In it, you play a test subject working through a series of rooms, using a “portal” gun to poke holes in the wall to get to each room’s exit. It’s a puzzle game — a totally innovative one that redefines both the shooter and puzzle genres — but what makes it so uniquely fun is the voice of GlaDoS commenting on your progress. As an A.I., her computer voice is deadpan the whole time, and the humor mostly revolves around your failures. I love it.
What are your favorite funny video games?
— Ashley
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