Rick And Morty Creator, Justin Roiland’s Latest Game Is Trover Saves the Universe

Long ago, Mark Twain, an old man who loved to write about long, lazy rivers and children painting fences, famously remarked that “humor is tragedy plus time.” With a Great American Novel or two under his belt, he later died after he correctly predicted that the reappearance of a comet would be the harbinger of his demise.

Trover Saves the Universe isn’t the next Great American Novel, but it’s evidence that Twain’s aforementioned adage is in need of some refinement. In the case of Trover, humor is VR plus platforming, sight gags, freewheeling voiceovers, tragedy, time, and a whole lotta little green power babies.

Trover Saves the Universe is the latest by Squanch Games, a studio co-founded by Tanya Watson, former executive producer at Epic Games, and Justin Roiland, the creator of the animated comedy Rick and Morty. The studio is likely best known for Accounting+, an absurd, metafictional narrative VR experience they developed in partnership with fellow experimental games hooligans Crows Crows Crows.

Though they’re a VR game studio, the company’s raison d’être differs from that of many of their contemporaries. Watson described their mission as “bridging the gap between comedy, storytelling, and VR gameplay.”

That first point is especially important to the studio. “We're always trying to find the funny,” Watson said. “If we can do our playtests and hear people laugh, then we know we've done a good thing. If that's not happening, then we just rip it out, re-record, keep going.”

Watson, who spent the duration of our interview on a treadmill, is a hard-working person. Having spent over a decade in the games industry doing impressive things like producing Fortnite, Watson’s transition to a position as the CEO and co-founder of a small VR company might seem at first like a curveball.

The moment Watson became a VR convert occurred at a conference when she was given the opportunity to put on a headset for the first time. “I just had this completely transcendent moment where I took it off and I had completely forgotten that I was even at the conference,” Watson said. Shortly after, she met Roiland, who’d harbored similar beliefs in VR as the future of storytelling and immersive experiences.

Squanch’s work is capable of delivering transcendent moments similar to what Watson experienced in that conference hall. Trover Saves the Universe is a shining example of VR’s potential as a medium for comedy.

The game kicks off with an eyeless, alien being called Glorkon who steal the protagonist’s two identically fluffy dogs and sticks them in his eyeholes as a part of his master plan to control the universe. Both the protagonist and Trover, a purple lightsword-wielding monster with “power babies” stuffed into his own empty eye sockets, are promptly roped into a scheme to stop Glorkon and retrieve the protagonist’s puppies.

Even in the tutorial, the game is a joy. The rapidfire jokes, both visual and verbal, are likely enough to captivate the user on their own. Roiland’s dialogue is like a golf cart driven drunkenly across a minefield of profanity and goopy alien dictionary entries. It’s frequently brilliant, even when the game is played with the family-friendly “censored” mode activated. You’ll be tempted to wait around in areas even after you’ve completed the objectives in them just to catch more of Roiland’s madcap voiceovers.

Yet even more joyful and revelatory are the many different ways in which Trover not only resists the technological limitations of the VR medium but embraces them. Similarly, Trover hacks away at many gaming conventions, subverting the expectations of anybody thinking it’ll play out like any other traditional platformer.

Take its control scheme. The narrative conceit for Trover’s unusual controls is that the player assumes the role of a Chairorpian, an alien species made of people who are perpetually confined to their chairs. But at the beginning of the game, Trover relinquishes control over his own body to the Chairorpian protagonist (because Trover’s “tired,” he says).

What results is a game that operates simultaneously in the first- and third-person perspective, which is a bonkers concept if you think about it long enough. The player spends most of their time controlling Trover and observing his actions from a distance, but different warp points placed throughout the game’s levels allow the player to assume different fixed points of perspective.

This unconventional first-plus-third-person perspective isn’t only a creative way to work around the locomotive limitations of VR; it yields many a comedic moment, as well. Early in the game, for instance, the player encounters an obnoxious, flying alien named “Mr. Pop-Up” who teaches the player how to “pop up” their chair so that they can get a better view of their surroundings. As you progress through the level, however, Mr. Pop-Up refuses to leave you alone, directly blocking your line of sight to Trover and bad-mouthing Trover when he’s far enough away from you.

The thing about Squanch’s work is that, in VR, it engages all of your senses in pursuit of the funny. Watson explained that they realized very quickly that VR-specific devices like spatial audio and the manipulation of a player’s sense of scale are especially conducive for producing comedy. “Being able to mess with the height of the player, being able to make them feel small, being able to put them in tight spaces — in a way, that all lends itself to comedy, right?” Watson said.

While many of Trover’s jokes are as out-there as you’d expect from Roiland, some of them are simply too difficult to articulate outside of VR — a fact that Squanch would likely consider a success. Though the game is fully playable as a traditional, non-VR game, playing with a headset delivers a fuller experience.

Watson argued that there’s an emotional component to VR’s advantage over non-VR gameplay when it comes to comedic experiences like Trover. “The nature of VR makes people a little bit more vulnerable,” she explained. “We've seen that people are more open and comfortable with laughing when they have a headset on.”

Though Trover Saves the Universe might bill itself as an action-adventure platformer, it’s much more than that. Ultimately, the hack-and-slash combat and collectible-hunting mechanics are merely vehicles for the game’s comedy.

More importantly, Trover realizes VR’s potential to deliver experiences that feel wholly unique, that engage multiple senses in the service of their message. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a visual gag in Trover is just as valuable and meaningful as any Great American Novel.

Trover Saves the Universe will be released on PC on June 4, 2019.