South Park: The Fractured But Whole review | Funny and really top-notch story

South Park: The Fractured But Whole brings together the best of the 20-odd year old series and mashes it together successfully with satisfying, surprisingly deep role-playing game mechanics. And fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes. If you’ve ignored or missed the series for the past few years, you’re going to go into this one and be quite lost – but the rest of us, well. Where to begin?

Cats are going missing. Cartman assembles his superhero team Coon and Friends to find one in particular, safe in the knowledge that the $100 reward will set up his half of the town’s superhero franchise nicely. Along the way he wants you to build up a social media following on Coonstagram, because nobody will care about you as a superhero unless they care about having a selfie taken with you. Drugs, conspiracies, towels – it quite obviously gets out of hand. This is classic South Park, and, yes, the name of the game is the Fractured But Whole. Let’s all say it out loud together.

Along the way you’ll bump into pretty much every character who has ever been in South Park since 1997 – or at least a reference to them. It’s an assault on the nostalgia gland for anyone who has been watching the show (and playing the games) over the last two decades. Ironic given recent series featured ‘Member Berries’, lampooning the overuse of nostalgia in modern culture. But hey, we can’t have everything.

I will maintain til the day I leave this mortal coil that South Park: The Fractured But Whole (and precursor the Stick of Truth) is up there with the best looking games ever made. Obviously not for finely honed architecture, pore-level detail on characters and expressive performance capture, but because it looks exactly how it’s supposed to look. And that makes it gorgeous.

Presentation matters a good deal here because of how it’s all set up – this is again a game-length episode of the show, so to craft that illusion in a compelling fashion it has to look right. It does. Even characters’ introductory artworks, in which they are doodled with a bit more detail, fit perfectly with how superheroes have been presented in the South Park of TV land. It nails it, and it riddles the Fractured But Whole with pure authenticity.

Speaking of authenticity: yes the humour is crass. Offensive to some. Clever and with a witty subtext at times, at others your character pinning down Captain Diabetes and passing gas in his face in order to force his ‘diabetes powers’ to kick in so he can destroy an obstacle in your path. You know, the usual sort of thing.

But where the Fractured But Whole again lines up with the TV show and manages to make itself different from most major gaming releases – and I’m well aware this is a deeply subjective statement – is that it’s actually funny. Not everything it throws at the wall sticks, and the repetition of one-liners gets old, fast. But generally speaking there’s at least a handful of belly laughs throughout the whole game, along with more than enough chuckles to keep you going. The scorched earth, offend all policy isn’t going to sit well with some, of course – and that’s fine – but there is a tenderness to some of the gags that might not be expected.

Yes, PC Principal hugely overreacts to every microaggression he hears, thus living up to his ‘social justice warrior’ tag quite literally. But the fact is he then goes on to explain what the microaggression was and why it could be offensive to some in quite reasonable Coonstagram terms. I might be being an idiot, but some of that might actually stick with those playing the game.

And that’s an argument that leads into the game proper – there too is something a bit more below the surface, an unexpected depth that lends itself to a much more fulfilling experience. The Fractured But Whole is very much an RPG in the classic sense – character classes, changing your squad to get the best balance for each fight, buff and debuff equipment, crafting and more – but simplified without losing what makes it satisfying.

Combat is much improved over the Stick of Truth, playing out as a turn-based battle on a grid. You can move certain distances, and attacks will only hit certain squares, in certain directions. It’s easy to get on with, but when things do ramp up there’s some satisfying strategy in the regular combat. I found it a mite easy on the default setting, but all the same this isn’t Cuphead or Dark Souls, so that’s not exactly a problem.

You can dress, re-dress and otherwise alter your character as you see fit (race and gender included); the story will continue with you in the same role regardless of who you are as a person. It’s a linear experience with side quests aplenty, not real the Witcher 3-style open world epic, but it definitely works a hell of a lot better in this fashion, forcing the story to keep up at a decent pace and making sure you rarely get bored.

There are nods to the Metroidvania genre of games, too, in that there are many areas and challenges you just cannot complete until you’ve unlocked other powers later in the game. Cracked walls and open circuits, heavily defended “medicinal fried chicken” joints and impassable lava (it’s Lego) strewn across the streets – at first it’s just there, something you see, can’t get past and ignore. But soon enough you’re going to back to those areas with a renewed vigour, ready to blast those red blocks off the pavement. It’s simple and old fashioned, but oh so satisfying.

South Park The Factured But Whole Where to buy

That’s South Park: The Fractured But Whole in a nutshell, really. It doesn’t bring anything new to gaming, or even the South Park series of RPGs. It refines and improves, changes and updates, but generally speaking it just gets things right, plays a fun game and keeps you engaged from start to finish. The fact it made me laugh a surprising amount throughout is just a bonus.