Organization: Adult Swim

Jazzpunk is different.  When its mother says it's a special and unique snowflake, that the other games only make fun of it because they have gout, that deformed ducklings are actually beautiful pigeons, she's right. If we had to categorize Jazzpunk in a "normal" genre so it can go to regular school instead of one with crocodile grades, it would be a first-person adventure.  But that's just a disguise.  Jazzpunk doesn't fit neatly into any classification, except something like "joke sandbox," of which it is the pioneering and only one of its kind. "And yet, it is still very much a game.  It looks like a game, it feels like a game, and it rewards its players like a game.  In fact, it's actually a lot of games: a yard sale assortment of almost-recognizable titles with strangers' names scrawled across them in black Sharpie, dropped in a one-price-for-all box someone decided to round out with whoopee cushions and books of Russian brain teasers.  This box is familiar and foreign, and while you can't possibly appreciate everything that's inside, you take it home and sort through the spoils, giggling at nostalgic discoveries of sticky hands and foam dinosaur pills.So what's actually in the box labeled "Jazzpunk"?  There's a 1950s spy motif, splashed across an alternate Cold War era reality where technology has evolved to the point of robot butlers but not past the point of banana phones.  This world is painted by a colorful, cartoonish brush that elicits memories of everything from Team Fortress 2 to Viewtiful Joe.  The characters that populate this 3D-but-at-times-2D land fit the strange anti-dimensionality well, as armless creatures that acknowledge they—or at least you, the player—look like bathroom symbols.