As a person obsessed with all British TV comedy shows, I was surprised to only just now hear of animated sitcom Full English, launching on Channel 4 later this month and featuring numerous well known actors, including The I.T. Crowd‘s Richard Ayoade.
As a person obsessed with all British TV comedy shows, I was surprised to only just now hear of animated sitcom Full English, launching on Channel 4 later this month and featuring numerous well known actors, including The I.T. Crowd‘s Richard Ayoade.
After playing the accompanying browser game, I will be making sure to definitely check the show out. Full English sometimes gets a little over-the-top with its jokes, but as a quick point-and-click adventure game to get your teeth into, you’ll find there are plenty of laughs to be had.
The Full English game acts as an “Episode Zero” for the TV series, with the aim to introduce the characters and the general premise. You play the Johnson family, each of whom as sucked into a video game and must work out how to escape.
Full English is extremely British, with numerous parodies of British celebrities and situations. In fact, it’s so British, that you really need to be from this neck of the woods to fully appreciate it. It’s not essential, but honestly, if you’re from the U.S., you’re not going to understand a lot of the references here.
If you are from the UK, however, prepare to enjoy yourself. Full English starts out as a simple point-and-click adventure, but soon shows its true colors, as parodies of various video games come thick and fast. The dialogue is snappy and made me laugh dozens of times, thanks in part to the great cast. The celebrity parodies are really well realized too.
However, it’s where the game takes the mickey out of popular video games that is really ups the ante. The Farmville parody in particular is not only hilarious, but makes some great points about the nature of social games in general. Glorious stuff.
The gameplay itself is decent, although nothing to write home about. Most of the puzzles are fairly self-explanatory and we managed to blast through the first two chapters of the game in under an hour. Fortunately, the lax gameplay means you can focus on the humor more.
Sometimes, however, Full English does take it a little too far. Multiple times I found myself questioning, “Are they even allowed to say things like that?” There are a lot of extremely rude jokes packed in here, and sometimes it all feels rather politically incorrect. I personally am quite dead inside to this sort of banter, so it didn’t rub me up the wrong way too badly, but there will no doubt be readers who take these sorts of jokes to task.
Full English may be a simply point-and-clicker, but it’s good fun and the parodies are often delicious. Just be aware that, if you’re not from the UK, a lot of it will go completely over your head.
