Jazzpunk is weird and funny and absurd. An adventure game in the mold of Stanley Parable, it shoves genres, jokes, and cultural references into a blender and offers the result with a nonplussed grin.
Luis Hernandez started working on Jazzpunk with Jess Brouse as part of Necrophone Games a while back, first bringing it to PC in 2014, and then to PS4 last year in the form of a Director’s Cut. Now that version is also coming to Steam along with an expansion pack titled “Flavour Nexus”
“We started working on Jazzpunk way back in 2007,” Hernandez said in an email. “Its crazy to think, a decade ago! Unity didn’t exist at the time, and there was barely an indie scene to speak of outside of a few titles (braid, world of goo being the two big ones).”
The Director’s Cut that made an eccentric but quiet splash on PS4 last year was a way for Hernandez and Brouse to add stuff they had originally envisioned for the game but were forced to leave out of the PC release due to a tight launch schedule, including cyberpunk segments and some of the duo’s favorite jokes in the entire game. In other words its the definitive version of the game and it will finally be available on PC starting June 16.
The game’s Flavour Nexus DLC will also come out that day, adding a “lost chapter” to the original game. In Jazzpunk, you play as a character named Polyblank, a secret agent of sorts tasked with completing one nonsense mission after another. The surreal structure and mishmash of game mechanics is intended, as Hernandez puts it, “so that people aren’t just first-person clicking their way through life,” and Flavour Nexus is in keeping with that philosophy.
“As is the nature with comedy games, I can’t reveal too much without spoiling the jokes,” he said, “but we do have some Vehicular Combat in there as one of the gag modules.” If Flavour Nexus is anything like the rest of the game, the cars will probably try to lobotomize you with their Andy Kaufman impressions.