The Procession to Calvary is the second part in a soon to be trilogy of comedic historical-themed Point&Click-Adventures mainly notable for their visuals, built entirely from renaissance-era paintings, cut-up and spliced together collage-style, with some crude animation to tie everything together, which ends up being exactly as unique and impressive to look at as it sounds like.
Sadly the rest of the game doesn't really live up to the quality of its presentation, with bog-standard Point&Click gameplay and somewhat mediocre puzzles, most of which are pretty easy, but there's a handful of questionable leaps, though nowhere near the kind of obtuse insanity the genre has become somewhat infamous for.
The game's also a bit on the short side, with a playthrough generally clocking in at around 2.5-3 hours and without much in the way of replayability, though, to be fair, it's a solo endeavour and not terribly expensive, so make of that what you will.
Finally, there's the writing, and I frankly don't care for it. Expect lots of try-hard "dark" humor and half-baked satire, a truly painful sequence of incredibly unfunny 4th wall breaks and many lazy attempts at capturing some of that Monty Python-style weirdness the storepage alludes to without fully grasping what makes it work. Of course, humor is inherently subjective and judging by some of the other reviews, there's a lot of people who seem to really enjoy the humor in this, so your mileage may vary.
Ultimately, the game's worth a look if only for the unique aesthethic, but don't go in expecting a masterpiece of comedy or adventure design. And if you haven't already, I'd also recommend trying out the "Four Last Things", the first entry in the trilogy, which is quite a bit shorter, with similarly dodgy puzzle design, but slightly better writing I'd say, and a plot that gives some admittedly optional background to the events of this game.
Final rating: 7.1/10
originally written on 11/04/2024
