While Four Last Things centred around sin and the joy of sinning and how great sins are, The Procession to Calvary zooms in a bit closer to focus in on a subset of wrath: murder. My favourite thing! I assume it’s the favourite thing of most gamers. Most games have us indiscriminately murder people without worrying about who’s going to clean up the mess or come knocking on our doors with a warrant.

Yes, The Procession to Calvary (I keep wanting to write “Cavalry”), is the follow-up to Joe Richardson’s Four Last Things; a series about desecrating classical works of art. This time, it’s slightly more expansive, a lot darker, and a lot more violent. And, gosh, that’s the good stuff right there.

NO MORE MURDERS!

You play as a holy warrior who is enjoying the church-sanctioned murder a holy war allows. When the holy war abruptly ends, even though her side was victorious, it is the worst day of her life because it means no more murder. She’ll have to endure a period of (ugh) peace.

She finds out that the leader of the enemy forces, Heavenly Peter, managed to escape. She’s able to parlay this knowledge into permission to murder Peter and sets out on a difficult quest of not murdering so that she again may murder.

Actually, she can still murder, but it is now frowned upon by God. If you don’t want to do a puzzle, you can pull out your sword and slice open whoever is standing in your way. Doing this, you can complete The Procession to Calvary in, like, five minutes. However, this results in getting the bad ending. But a bad ending is still an ending! Unless we’re going by GameCenter CX rules.

LOOK AT MY MASSIVE KEY

Once again, the graphics were all created by taking classical paintings, chopping them up, and pasting them back together. This sort of forces the humour in a religious direction, as well as, “Hey, look at what is happening in this weird art!” This time around, it has a few more recognizable shades of Monkey Island, which I think is law in the world of adventure games.

And while Four Last Things was, essentially, one giant quest, The Procession to Calvary follows the more standard point-and-click adventure routine of arriving in a new area, getting a specific task, and accomplishing said task to move on. Always talk to the person who’s blocking your way first. Decades of RPGs have taught me to screw around in all directions before advancing the narrative, but in poinks, you have to do the logical opposite.

Like Four Last Things, it’s well-designed to the point where I sometimes had to stop and think, but I never needed outside help. Right on that perfect borderline. For me, at least.

It’s also rather short (I left it idle while I walked the dog and ate dinner, so I don’t have an accurate estimate of runtime), which I appreciate in a poink adventure. A compelling narrative requires a build-up of energy that gets released at the end, and in the adventure genre, in terms of actual gameplay, that is something extraordinarily difficult to pull off. The genre moves at one speed, and that’s “mallwalker,” so it’s better for them to be short, since that requires less energy and a smaller release.

THE BEST KIND OF CHARLATAN

I love the protagonist; a complete sociopath that is only happy when they’re killing. It’s a terrific follow-up to the good-natured sinner. The fact that she’s so morally bent makes it easy to laugh at her relentless haplessness and gullibility. And the way that the universe reacts to her ultra-violence as though she’s committing a faux pas is always amusing.

If there’s one thing I didn’t like about the style of humour here, it’s the fourth-wall breaking jokes. Not the jokes that break the fourth-wall, but the ones that call attention to the fourth-wall being broken. Little vignettes that break away and internally criticize the use of fourth-wall breaking. Maybe it’s just me, but I hate that. Winking and saying, “Ugh, fourth-wall breaking jokes, amirite?” sours the entire fourth-wall breaking joke. This happened a solid twice in my playthrough, which is twice too many.

Otherwise, the quality is generally the same, in terms of humour. Again, I didn’t break down into hysterics over anything. My sides had little risk of splitting. But there were plenty of amusing or chuckle-worthy spots. The little knight falling over the railing with the clatter of pots and pans, then abruptly waking up on a distant shore and coughing up a fish will forever be burned into my memory. As will the quest to find a rosy-cheeked boy with a pert little butt.

But then, the abundant amount of crucifixion will also be stuck there for less fun reasons. Humanity really sucks, and some things are hard to laugh at. I suppose when you’re deriving all a game’s assets from classical art, it’s a difficult subject to avoid.

WARNING: MAY CAUSE AN APPRECIATION OF ART

I’m really enjoying my stroll through Joe Richardson’s “Triptych” series. It’s worth it enough that The Procession to Calvary and Four Last Things have personality leaking out their ears, but they’re also solid adventure games with clever puzzle design that will make you feel smart for figuring them out.

The Procession to Calvary is nothing groundbreaking, but it’s an extremely solid follow-up to the already great Four Last Things. I’m looking forward to grabbing Death of the Reprobate and capping off the series when I can afford it. Which isn’t right now, but hopefully soon. If you haven’t tried the games, however, you’ve got some catching up to do.

7/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam copy of the game. It was paid for by the author via generous donations from readers like you.