Satire is a genre that you find often enough in mediums like film and television, but there is an argument to be made that it doesn’t happen as often in games, and that maybe, this is due for a reckoning. This is the argument that Davide Soliani (Mario + Rabbids) and Christian Cantamessa (Red Dead Redemption) are making about the game they’re co-directing, Bradley the Badger, a comedic, half-throwback, half-fresh-take platformer revealed at The Geoff Keighley Night this week.
“The film and television industry has a long history now of parody and satire,” Cantamessa told VGC in an interview that went up alongside the reveal. “In Hollywood, they call it navel-gazing, but it’s healthy, it’s humorous, it’s fun. It opens up some of the dusty closets to the audience, which always has an interest in how the sausage is made.”
He went on to mention Seth Rogen’s recent Hollywood satire show The Studio, noting if the TV industry is ready for that, “and the film industry has Birdman, the comic book industry has Deadpool… I think the games industry is ready for a healthy dose of satire.”
This is, perhaps, a bit of an odd framing to take, in that it makes it sound like there has never been any satirical games, though I think The Stanley Parable, Portal, and even arguably much older games like Earthbound might have something to say about that. Hell, let’s not forget Conker’s Bad Fur Day, a game that Bradley the Badger clearly partially pulls from.
To give the game some credit, it does look quite fun! A game about a game falling apart and seeing behind the code so to speak is not a novel concept necessarily, but I like the look of the systems that let titular Bradley be a game dev himself. And it’s being more directly satirical of games like Bloodborne and Cyberpunk, which is admittedly not a common thing to do, though I wonder if this didn’t have such big industry names attached to it whether it would get away with such presentations.
Whether Bradley the Badger will be successful in its satire, or even just being a good game, we’ll have to wait and find out, but you can wishlist it here if you’re curious about it all the same.
