The deliberately off-kilter title almost speaks for itself here: Hothead Games’ DeathSpank ($15) is a hilarious hack-and-slash RPG now available in the Mac App Store. You control the title character on his quest to find The Artifact, collecting weapons and items along the way. Play alone or enjoy a local cooperative mode if you have an additional controller.
And you’ll probably want to share this experience with a friend.
If the humor seems familiar, that’s because Ron Gilbert worked on the project—a key developer behind the first two Monkey Islands, who also helped develop the Penny Arcade game. The animation is really cool, with 3-D characters overlaid on beautiful stylized backgrounds.
You should get about 15 hours of gameplay out of this one, not counting the additional times you play through to catch the jokes you missed the first time around. One word of warning: make sure your Mac’s specs are up to snuff before you buy. The requirements are on the Mac App Store page, and you’ll want plenty of free disk space, a recent video card, and a relatively up-to-date CPU.
