If you love stilted line readings, awkward character animation and the occasionally brilliant writing of a BioWare RPG, Velvet Sundown is your jam. Sort of.
Velvet Sundown is a hilariously weird game. It’s an RPG of sorts — you take control of a character — one of several well-heeled partygoers on a fancy yacht off the coast of a fictional Caribbean island — and you have conversations with your fellow upper crust. Everyone has secret objectives, assigned at the beginning — you exchange drugs, money, information and the like from the get go. But for most of the game, you’re having conversations. Bizarre, surreal conversations.
What makes this so interesting — and unpredictable — is the fact that each character on the boat is a real live human, attached to a keyboard somewhere on the actual planet earth. The results are often hilarious. In this mostly-uncut clip of my first full game, I encountered a person who proclaimed that John Madden was a fingerless god, and he was there to preach the word. They kept it up the full length of the game (close to 30 minutes) and never once broke character.
Velvet Sundown is available now on Steam, and free to play, though there are "premium" scenarios that require a subscription fee.
Editor's note: I wrote that the clip is "mostly uncut" because I edited out a very short segment where one of the characters makes an off-color remark about rape. Still visible in the video is my character saying "no rape jokes, bro" as a response to that remark.