Accounting+ (PS4)

Effective comedy often involves a delicate balance of timing and subverting expectations, and while a tightly scripted performance can balance these factors, improvisational comedy (or works masquerading as such) can often come up short because the jokes aren’t so tightly presented. An improvisational performance does give an illusion of greater authenticity, the meandering tangents, vocal filler, and repetition of words closer to how we speak in normal conversations, but it also makes it less likely the listener will get an amusing bit of comedy at the end. The virtual reality game Accounting+ is perhaps unsurprisingly not actually about accounting work, but while it takes you to a handful of wacky and wild worlds, its style of comedy makes this journey far less hilarious than it could have been.

 

The game actually opens rather well, partly because it does start off clearly scripted and without some of the issues that will plague it later. Accounting+ opens with you in a sparsely populated white and grey void where a pleasantly voiced narrator named Clovis helps introduce some of the game’s features to you. Since he has clear focus in what he is saying, he is able to provide some well-conceived jokes in between the important information, and while it is certainly subdued, it is an effective intro that seems promising. Soon though the game begins, the premise being that an accounting program has been developed where people enter virtual reality to better perform the normally mundane task. As soon as you put on your goggles to get to work though, you find yourself in a different program entirely, and from there you plunge deeper and deeper into other strange virtual reality programs that the player is mostly meant to sit back and listen to, the interactivity often fairly light and rarely much of a challenge or puzzle. There are a few side paths you can take by performing a specific unique interaction so it’s not a fully linear adventure, but only one level in the game really seems to have any sort of puzzle-solving with many of the others often just being about following instructions or eventually using a fairly limited set of objects nearby to trigger whatever progresses the game.

Accounting+ really isn’t about what you’re doing in VR though. Your actions progress whatever fairly tiny plot each new level has but besides a section where you shoot at some police cars there’s rarely even a test of your ability or problem-solving skills, especially since those police cars don’t really pose a threat anyway. Other times it’s mostly about moving objects around with hands represented by arrow cursors, but really you’re mostly meant to enter a new space, find and listen to whatever weird characters operate there, and then move along to the next one. As such, the game leaves very heavily on its comedy to try and be its main appeal, and some of the ideas do sound fairly funny on paper. One level involves a clown ranting about his efforts to uncover a secret zoo level, another has you appear in a delightful wooded area only for a man in a tree to pop out and start shouting at you for touching his stuff, and unfortunately I fear listing too many more since the game is incredibly short and fairly light in content. It is a bit odd the game tries to delude you into thinking there is much more content than there is, promising levels that don’t exist or presenting false ideas that certain actions can heavily influence the stages you encounter, but in reality Accounting+ will probably last 1 to 2 hours and that depends on how long you spend in the handful of levels listening to characters ramble aimlessly.

 

Accounting+ can be a funny game, despite its best efforts to prevent that. Almost every character you encounter once you enter the virtual world is performed with a meandering improvisational style, often without much clear direction on what kind of jokes they’re working up to. What this can often manifest as is the characters routinely saying swearwords over and over in place of actual comedic lines, an onslaught of f-bombs bound to barrage you as if the performers were middle schoolers who just learned their parents can’t actually prevent them from swearing outside of the house. Unfortunately, with the many trailing sentences, stutters, and other fruitless tangents that such an improv-inspired performance style entails, this can mean you spend a long time listening to characters bumble their way to something that might have been funny if it hadn’t taken thirty seconds to deliver the line. For example, you encounter a gang of animals who believe their mundane activities are fairly hardcore, and while the directionless performance style is meant to match their train-of-thought thinking on what constitutes being cool, tightening up the lines would still deliver the same enjoyably askew view on what constitutes hooliganism. Instead, you’ll hear them tell the same jokes or take far too long building up to a weak payoff. The tree guy mentioned earlier is perhaps your first real encounter with the swear-laden empty ranting style though, and he really is just shouting iterations of “don’t touch my stuff” repeatedly with very little evolution in how its performed or portrayed. On his own he might be an amusing if annoying idea, but so much of the cast takes a similar albeit less grating approach to the things they have to say.

 

There are times where the game doesn’t get in its own way, and sometimes it can even concoct a clever inversion of its joke-telling style. One of the best uses of its off-the-cuff joke-telling format actually comes from a character who is portrayed at being absolutely awful at coming up with anything on the spot, a refreshing breather from a barrage of people who rarely let up in rapid fire and yet somehow aimless chatter. There are certainly times where you can tell someone hit on a good idea and is properly able to build up to it or work it in well, and sometimes the absurdity of where you find yourself still comes through effectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game’s best jokes are often quick and punchy. Perhaps too often you can see the landing strip for where a joke is heading and you’re just waiting for it to land so the character can move onto something new, but an abrupt direction shift or a sudden discovery in the lightly interactive spaces you find yourself in can lead to a joke that doesn’t ruin itself by being slow.

Sometimes the light interactivity can be a blessing too, especially if you want to find the alternate routes. Many stages can be completed incredibly quickly, the fact there is little to actually do meaning you can move on rather quickly if you like. However, it is clear that you’re meant to stay around and listen for a while, although unfortunately even in the few moments that the game could almost be said to have something you need to figure out, characters will shift their speech to blatantly hinting at how to progress, sometimes even before you’ve really had time to even consider what to do next to progress. While having a hint system for people who are stuck makes sense, characters almost never let up in their incessant talking and so it can quite quickly transition from discussing the situation and trying to be funny to immediately giving away whatever action needs to be performed to head to the next level. The relentless line delivery can even lead to the game stepping on its own toes at times. One area has a radio where you can listen to different channels, but a character nearby will keep talking over it, even looping his own lines to guarantee you have to struggle to make out the new content. In that animal gang segment mentioned earlier, a situation arose where the rabbit girl’s lines started looping while the rest of the gang’s dialogue was still moving forward, and since she had many reactive lines in it, she was responding to statements that weren’t being made while again making it harder to hear what new stuff was being said by her companions.

 

Accounting+ really is  just a rise and fall in how troublesome its approach to comedy can be. Some spaces like a talking skeletal xylophone that really wants you to play it give you room to quickly perform the action, see how it reacts, and move along without having to worry too much about it going on and on without saying all that much. Some areas at least give you a few standing spaces to teleport to so you can look around and maybe find something silly or strange, and some of the ideas are entertaining on a conceptual level when you first encounter them. The game stews in them far too long though despite being far too short, although at least that means it doesn’t run itself into the ground. It can feel underwhelming when you suddenly pop up at the ending, but had there been perhaps another hour of the same approach to joke delivery, it could definitely start to truly grate. Instead, it’s easier to passively absorb whatever is being shouted at you and try to scoop up the moments that work before heading off to the next level and hoping it has a bit more to offer.

THE VERDICT: Accounting+ takes 20 minutes of effective comedy and stretches it to 2 hours, and unfortunately the strain of padding things with swears and meandering line delivery ends up ruining some of its punchlines. Traveling to the abnormal worlds and meeting unusual characters still provides a flicker of fascination each time you make a new jump, but with very little of interest for you to actually engage with, you’re left listening mostly to self-sabotaging comedy routines that harm their own material with their sometimes directionless improvisations. A thick-skinned player might have better tolerance for listening to the relentless ranting to get to the effective jokes, but since Accounting+ seems to forget it’s even a VR game at times, it all comes down to the quality of what you’re meant to sit back and watch, and unfortunately it’s constantly getting in its own way.

 

And so, I give Accounting+ for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. The fact this isn’t a notch lower on the rating scale is meant to show how many moments can still squeak through despite the poor choice in delivering comedy to the player. It’s fairly easy to become a bit numb to all the meandering chatter and it might even be the game is hoping you forget how much air is filled with characters repeating themselves or failing to reach an interesting end to their line of thought. A few standout moments are meant to stick with the player, but the game isn’t quite brisk enough to make it easy to forget those moments where you hear a character bumbling their way to their next statement. Some ideas could have worked fine in isolation, the tree guy could have been a more effective concept with his constant swearing in a whiny voice if you didn’t go on to encounter many more characters with similar voices and the same taste for cursing up a storm. Others just feel like they would have worked better without any sort of improvisational bent to their delivery, perhaps even the juxtaposition of a more sure-footed speaker next to a more nervous mutterer making moments have a specific appeal. A big appeal of the game is found in seeing which strange situation you are plopped into every time you character enters a new VR world, but when so many of them are cut from the same cloth, it can lose its luster.

 

While I have given them equal ratings, I do think Accounting+ is worse than Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality since that game at least had some more moments that valued interactivity and problem-solving. Both games suffer from many of the same issues, especially in terms of characters who are constantly blabbering on and criticizing you for wanting to stop and listen to them. Voice actor Justin Roiland was involved in both and he helped found Squanch Games who helped develop this title, but I had hoped the distance from the Rick and Morty brand might have lead to it carving its own path in terms of humor and style. Without the recognizable brand it seems almost more aimless, but again the game’s biggest problem seems to be it has some good ideas but doesn’t know how to handle them. A sillier and shorter version of this game could exist if it was properly edited, but by letting everything drag on there ends up being less to enjoy, and whatever “authenticity” is added by having characters have the kind of natural stumbles we find in normal speech could have still be included in smaller amounts. Instead, the abundance of improvisational fumbles gets in they way of what is essentially a group of skits to watch, this comedic VR journey not able to elicit as many laughs because of its deliberate choice to stretch things out.