Games are often at their funniest when they’re not trying to be. It’s the Skyrim NPC who’s determined to deliver their stock line, apparently totally unperturbed by the dragon attack happening just behind him. It’s watching your custom character enter a sombre cutscene, standing eight feet tall and wearing a banana outfit. There’s something about the way games stoically keep up the pretense that this is all real, no matter how broken things have become in the moment, that’s sheer comedy gold.
What about the games who dare to be funny on purpose, though? That’s a rarer collective. If comedy’s all about timing, and games are all about giving you the agency to go and do what you like, when you like – well, you can see the problem. But some brave pieces of software still manage to pull it off in the face of that adversity, and we’ve corralled ten of the best ever to do so, from vintage point-and-clicks to more recent hits, from indies to blockbusters.
Trying to to decide a ranked list or order of funniness seemed like too serious a task for the subject matter – comedy is, of course, completely subjective, so your mileage may vary – but with that in mind, here are IGN’s picks for the ten funniest games of all time. Settle in, and be ready to wishlist a few titles to counteract that Last Of Us Part 2 playthrough.
Promise Mascot Agency
You could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that Promise Mascot Agency was yet another run-of-the-mill open-world mascot management simulator. It is not. Made by Paradise Killer developer Kaizen Game Works, what we have here is a town full of oddities, a van full of gas, and a story so convoluted and absurd that to describe it is to stare into the eye of madness.
There are kittens in railway administration roles. There are weeping mascots doing their level best to cheer up the patrons of a bookstore. There’s the constant threat of organized crime, looming in the background while you hit a dirt ramp in your van, which then sprouts wings to catch some sick air.
In simple terms, you’re a former Yakuza trying to lay low by operating a mascot business in the suburbs, managing the constant time and financial pressures that such a business must withstand. It’s narrative-led, but also totally freewheeling and nonsensical, and that gives Promise Mascot Agency the feeling that you’re playing one big elaborate, open-world improv. Yes, and… play it.
Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery
A small sloth is experiencing a haunting. A welcome sign for an invisible wizard has been vandalized, and corruption runs rife in Cowboy County. Grave, deeply serious matters, all of them, which, as a frog with a magnifying glass, you must address.
And yet here Frog Detective is on this list of funny games. Granted, you don’t often see detectives holding their sides and trying to contain their laughter on the job, but there’s just something about peering at a crime suspect through a giant magnifying glass and seeing only a sheep in a short-sleeved shirt giving you a benign and unwavering smile. It’s irrepressibly funny.
The mysteries are brief affairs, and exceptionally easy to solve. Instead of challenges for the grey matter, Grace Bruxner and Thomas Bowker’s trio of Frog Detective mysteries are just setups for wholesome farces, soundtracked by surprisingly catching low-fi jazz, and set in a universe of unwavering positivity and can-do attitudes. You might only be the second-best detective around, but you’re having the best time.
South Park: The Stick Of Truth
To say South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker like pushing the boundaries of taste and decency is a bit like saying Nathan Drake’s got decent grip strength, or that Blizzard’s quite fond of a loot box here and there. As such, there are entire sequences in the wondrous South Park: The Stick of Truth that we couldn’t possibly describe – nor remain straight faced at.
Stone and Parker were deeply involved as collaborators with the role-playing masters at developer Obsidian for this razor-sharp 2014 RPG. A story about a new kid trying to befriend his peers during an elaborate game of fantasy LARPing, the duo’s involvement lends it the same quality of observational humour about gaming that made Make Love, Not Warcraft an all-timer of an episode
Why does it work? Well, let’s take farting as an example. If you’re older than seven, you’re probably not in a fit of hysterics when you first learn that farts can be used as an attack in combat. But The Stick of Truth commits to the bit and makes passing gas more than a passing gag, turning it into a shockingly detailed and nuanced mechanic, to the point that you’re learning new fart moves from NPCs like unlocking new dragon shouts in Skyrim. Considering all that, it’s hard not to submit to South Park’s confrontationally juvenile gag.
IGN’s Editor Picks
As we pointed out earlier, comedy is highly subjective, so no single list could capture every IGN editor’s very personal sense of humour. We did want to showcase the vast array of comedy in games, though, so we asked a few staff members what their personal picks are. Their answers may surprise you: while there are plenty of games clearly designed around jokes, for some, it’s the silly stuff that gameplay allows, rather than pre-designed gags, that gets them laughing.
Max Scoville’s Picks
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Jazzpunk, Accounting 101, High on Life, Postal 2, Untitled Goose Game, Saints Row: The Third, Deadpool (2013), Happy Wheels, Drawful.
Simon Cardy’s Picks
Grim Fandango, Disco Elysium, Red Dead Redemption 2, Thank Goodness You’re Here, Hitman: World of Assassination, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Matt Purslow’s Picks
Gunpoint, Tactical Breach Wizards, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Helldivers 2, Worms, Disco Elysium, Fable 2, Skin Deep.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch
“Nobody suspects a thing.” That’s what the wonderful soundtrack for Octodad: Dadliest Catch keeps telling you as you do your best to maintain the facade that you’re just a normal, everyday human husband and father and not – and I’m not sure why you’d ever even think this – an octopus wearing a suit.
As core premises go, they don’t get much better than that. There’s a whole subgenre of physics-based slapstick to address when you’re talking about funny games, and the likes of Baby Steps, Goat Simulator and Surgeon Simulator deserve their dues. But nobody’s married the physical comedy of an obtuse control set to an genuinely emotional premise quite as well as Young Horses did in 2017. As you lollop around quaint suburban locations like grocery stores, offices and your own beautifully decorated home, trying to avoid suspicion by moving in as human a manner possible and knocking the bare minimum of objects over with your flailing tentacles, the real hook is that you actually care about keeping Octodad’s secret.
The Stanley Parable
If it wasn’t handled so precisely, The Stanley Parable would be too meta, too confusing, and too pleased with itself to enjoy. But somehow it avoids such a fate, instead making walking along the same corridor over and over again feel like a delight, and hearing a new line of Kevan Brighting’s silky voiceover akin to finding a super-secret armor set in Dark Souls.
Precisely what the eponymous parable is depends on your particular playthrough. Stanley’s experiencing a kind of Groundhog Day in which the only constants are that he wakes up at his desk in an office, and that all his coworkers have disappeared.
You’ll live for centuries in some playthroughs, depending on what seem at the time like arbitrary choices like going through one door or another. In other playthroughs, it’ll all be over in a few minutes and you’ll barely have left your desk before you reach an ending. The writing is playfully self-aware throughout as it deconstructs this whole interactive media thing, but the biggest joke of all is the silliness of its premise. Quite simply, how much game can one make about a character walking through an empty world devoid of characters, and whose only interactions come down to choosing between forks in the road? Enough to warrant an expanded Ultra Deluxe Edition almost a decade later, clearly.
West of Loathing
There probably wasn’t much worth laughing about for those living in the wild West, what with all the spoiled meat and dysentery (cards on the table, much of our historical knowledge comes from The Oregon Trail). But it’s certainly been a rich vein of comedy for everyone from Blazing Saddles, The Three Amiigos and City Slickers, all the way to West of Loathing, a black and white, 2D side-scrolling adventure RPG with an incredible gag rate.
Every book title, every item description, every NPC interaction, they’re all just jam-packed with warm, clever jokes. So much so that as you play, you find yourself turning into one of those completionist maniacs that read every book in Skyrim or piece together Dark Souls lore, just to ensure you soak up every last drop of the good stuff. The game’s smart about training you to play that way, too: in your home during the opening, if you look at enough books on the shelf you’ll eventually find one that grants you the ‘perk’ of having a silly walk. From that point on you know you’ve got to get your nose into every monochrome corner of this old West caper.
Portal 2
Feel free to swap in the first game here, if you’re particularly into the cake and the musical finale. Portal certainly set a high bar for humour in and around the Aperture Science test chambers and established an unforgettably menacing foil in GLaDOS. The only way to top it? Portal 2: the sequel featuring Stephen Merchant, a potato, and a double-cross that nobody saw coming.
Wheatley is comedy gold throughout the, er – ambitious AI’s character arc. At first it’s his simple ineptitude that tugs at the corners of your mouth. Then it’s hearing that friendly British regional accent spit absolute malice at you. Finally, the absolute absurdity of a final showdown between one sadistic rogue AI trapped in a potato and another who’s rapidly discovering their hunger for power is not matched by their problem-solving skills. Oh, and there’s another song.
Imagine how punishing all those puzzles would be if they weren’t punctuated by such immaculately delivered comedic beats. Would you have tried so hard to figure out exactly where to place all that colored goo? No, exactly. Nobody would.
The LucasArts Legacy
It wouldn’t be right to talk about comedy in games without giving a shoutout to the incredible run of adventures that came out of LucasArts during the ‘90s, nor the works that came from Double Fine from the ‘00s onwards. We could easily fill up this list exclusively with games Tim Schafer has worked on: Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and Broken Age to name but a few. We still haven’t totally forgiven him for that ticket printing puzzle in Grim Fandango, but on balance it was probably worth it for the decades of joy those games have brought us all.
The other big name from those halcyon LucasArts days, Ron Gilbert, is still hard at work releasing – among other things – the long-awaited Return to Monkey Island in 2022, and Death By Scrolling, an action-roguelike in which, well, you already know what the screen does.
Time Gentlemen, Please!
Ben and Dan have a humble ambition: they want to watch a Magnum PI marathon on TV. Quite how this turns into a cataclysmic event that accidentally enslaves all of humanity is not easy to piece together, but it is enjoyable.
It’s also the kind of setup that an early ‘90s point-and-click would have been proud of, and developer Zombie Cow Studios is ready to give a reverential nod to many of those classic titles. There are posters for Sam & Max and Full Throttle dotted around on walls in the background. There’s an undead kid called Gilbert, along with quoted lines from Ron Gilbert’s Monkey Island series. But rather than retread that old ground for nostalgia’s sake, Time Gentlemen, Please! Has its fun by poking fun at the old genre conventions, pointing out the inherent absurdity of carrying around massive inventories of random items in the hope they’ll be useful later. Not that making a TV aerial out of a coat hanger and accidentally time-travelling is any less absurd, of course.
The Secret of Monkey Island
LucasArts ruled the ‘90s when it came to point-and-clicks, but it’s 1990’s Secret of Monkey Island where the most precious comedy gold is buried. Guybrush Threepwood might walk around telling everyone he’s a mighty pirate, but his immutable golden retriever energy makes it difficult to believe that he’s the one who’ll pass the Three Trials required for full pirate status, take on the Dread Pirate LeChuck and win Governor Elaine’s heart. Not to mention his proclivity for stuffing random objects into his pants. Not your typical swashbuckler, this guy(brush).
This was the game that gave us insult sword-fighting, a verbal disagreement turned into a tense combat system that only Ron Gilbert’s LucasArts team could pull off. It’s also a game that manages to make (very) early nineties pop culture references sit flush with age-old pirate fantasy. Thus, we have a tropical island where a fast-talking used boat salesman in a bad tweed blazer is waiting to accost you, and where vending machines line the streets. The puzzle logic might be up for debate, but its ear for funny can’t be called into question, even three decades on.
Disco Elysium
Your first clue that this isometric RPG might not be entirely straight-faced comes in Disco Elysium’s very opening scene, in which your hungover protagonist can over-exert himself reaching for his necktie and simply die. Game over, try again. That’s a heck of a way to set a tone.
There are also frequent moments of real pathos, horror, and tragedy in ZA/UM’s 2019 RPG masterclass, and they’re so well written that it never feels dissonant that five minutes later when you’re smashing a lorry window, one of the options is to “smash it, apologetically.”
Pleasingly, the funniest character in the game is you, the player, in control of an alcoholic cop who can’t remember where he parked his car (it’s in the ocean) and who, after asking his partner to borrow their gun, puts it straight in their mouth in front of the armed wing of a dockworker’s union. No matter how unseriously you take your role, Disco Elysium has a way of simply rolling with it without ever undermining the darker narrative beats when they arrive.
And that concludes today’s listing of IGN’s pick of the funniest games of all time. We hope you agree with our choices, or at the very least are not angry at us for telling you about them in an effort to inform you about something that might make you laugh. What are your favorite comedy video games? Let us know in the comments below.
Phil Iwaniuk is a veteran hardware smasher and game botherer who has written for the likes of PC Format, Official PlayStation Magazine, PCGamesN, The Guardian, Eurogamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and IGN. He won an award once, but he doesn’t like to go on about it.
