Funny Shotgun
Darios Uclaray
The Looker has us solving puzzles by drawing lines between start and end points. They start as simple as the maze puzzles on a restaurant's kids activity sheet then grow more complex. Like in J.Blo's Puzzle Island, some puzzles require looking at the environment in new ways and from new perspectives. Some are funny and others I have been genuinely pleased to solve (except for one which, I suspect, only required trial-and-error because I wasn't paying enough attention to an earlier puzzle teaching me the solution). One small word of warning: one puzzle is based around sound, though I suppose you could brute-force it.
Also, it's funny. I'm being vague because part of the fun is seeing what The Looker does with the foundations of The Witness, but many jokes play with expectations, or are surprises, or come from realisations. Others come more straightforwardly in audio logs with daft riffs on Gravity's Rainbow, Invisible Cities, philosophy, and poetry colliding into foolishness. I laughed at many jokes! Aloud! I realise that's what jokes are for, but so few video game parodies are actually funny.
You can download The Looker fully free from Steam. It's made by Bradley Lovell, aka Subcreation Studio. If you've played it and are curious about some of the tech works, Lovell has explained more on his site.
In our glowing The Witness review, Richard Moss said it's "actually quite brilliant, if you can ignore its layer of self-satisfied philosophical grandiosity". We declared it one of our favourites games of 2016 too.
When Skyrim NPCs absolutely will not stop standing on chairs, walking into walls, and getting generally confused about pathfinding their way around one loose cobblestone in the road, I usually just sigh and roll my eyes. They don't know any better and they never will, I remind myself.
Turns out, it's a lot damn funnier when an actual human being does the same things with some panache and commitment to the role. This guy on TikTok (also on YouTube if you're an Old like me) has a whole series of "Skyrim IRL" videos where he replicates the ridiculous habits of Skyrim's less-sentient inhabitants.
Anyway, here's the first one I saw and probably the first one worth watching. He has one prior but gives up the gag by not being fully prepared to deadpan his exit (still funny though). JinnKid does the full Skyrim routine: offering a weird and unsolicited opinion to the POV character and then standing up, walking directly into his chair, glitching on top of it, and finally moonwalking away to the opposite wall. Some combination of the actual Skyrim tavern music in the background and JinnKid's fully serious face sells it and I honestly keep laughing out loud.
By now, a few months later, JinnKid's really got the act nailed. He's got the Nord accent down. He does the slightly stilted and uncanny walk cycles. There are silly outfits. Ah yes, and this one's a joke about sticking a pot on an NPC's head to obscure their vision. Classic move, dragonborn.
If this is your jam, you can find the rest of JinnKid's Skyrim IRL videos in this YouTube playlist. There are plenty more NPCs to flex on, from Cicero the goofy Dark Brotherhood jester to the classic arrow to the knee guard. Skyrim memes never die, they just grow up. You can also find his videos on TikTok at @jinnkid I suppose, but I don't know a thing about that so you're on your own.
This original wedding ceremony script was written for a nontraditional funny 'shotgun wedding ceremony,' in which the couple is pregnant on their wedding day! It includes funny wedding vows, jokes about pregnancy hormones and parenting, a heartfelt blessing from the officiant, alternate gender-neutral wording for LGBTQ+ couples, guest participation, and much more!
What is a shotgun wedding? Historically, this type of wedding was planned quickly because the bride was pregnant. These days, the stigma is gone and modern 'shotgun' weddings can mean playful and joyful occasions that celebrate the beginning of a new family, starting with the union of two people who are expecting a child.
"Do you [PARTNER A], take this gorgeous woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to live together in matrimony, to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, to support her dreams and take turns feeding the baby at night, and to cherish her from this day forward, as long as you both shall live?"
"Before I make this thing official, [PARTNER A] and [PARTNER B] will share in a symbolic unity toast. Like their vows and rings, this toast represents promises for the future, and they want all of you to join in the fun.
"By the authority vested in me by the State of [WEDDING STATE] and the prestigious internet-church American Marriage Ministries, I now pronounce you (Husband and Wife / Spouses for Life / Married / etc.}.
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