Day 33 - Courage: The Videogame
ARG, Creepypasta, Platformer ·
Skeeter’s Take:
I was excited for Courage: The Videogame. I grew up watching Courage: The Cowardly Dog, the animated children’s show this game is based off of. It used to scare the hell out of me, and I contribute parts of that to my love of horror to this day. I also enjoy seeing games that are trying to replicate an era of video games. Often I’m much more forgiving on dated mechanics because they usually feel intentional to make the product feel more authentically from the time. I initially thought that Courage: The Videogame was going to be a nice little PS1 throwback 3D platformer. I wasn’t expecting much, and I knew this game was unfinished going in, but on the downloads page I happened to find this explanation of how the game was found:
Here’s the thing. I don’t want to accuse anyone of lying, but I don’t know how much I believe this story. To me, it screams “creepypasta” or “ARG”. Maybe I just can’t wrap my brain around someone selling a hard drive without wiping it first, but then again that’s something I’m not even sure my parents would do, so maybe that’s just me. The vague wording wasn’t helping its case, and there’s a bit of a conundrum about updating a game that was supposedly found. I’m skeptical, but I thought I’d give it the benefit of the doubt. They nailed the artstyle of the show and the layout of the house is nearly identical to how I remember it from the show. Just look at the model for Courage:
Ain’t he adorable?
They even recreated his exact computer room, down to the mouse hole.
Visually, this game hits the nail of the show on the head. It clearly has a lot of love put into it, and I appreciate the attention to detail.
If we believe the old hard drive story, I would assume these were the assets created by the original creator.
My playthrough consisted of me running around until I found the single interactive prompt that allowed me to progress to the next single interactive prompt. There’s no direction or reason for your actions in this game. The player must first go to the PC and interact with it. When I say “Interact”, I mean that you click the “Interact” button on a red question mark and then the question mark disappears. There’s no dialogue or animations to indicate what the player has accomplished, and there’s no clues or hints at where the next question mark can be found. Interacting with the PC will turn the lights red downstairs in the living room. Then the player has to interact with the kitchen door, which turns off the red lights. The player is expected to go back up to the computer room where there is an old recognizable face - The Spirit of the Harvest Moon
Interacting with him will give you the following pop up:
The player then can interact with the front door and will be teleported to a ritual area out of time with empty chairs and empty hallways:
And that’s kind of it. If you follow the lines of the sigil and hit the chairs in the correct order, a “successful” jingle sound effect will play. I couldn’t figure out where to go from here. I was just trapped in this mostly empty space. In the comments section on the game’s itch.io page, deathbyzombie posted a video where he finds Muriel’s Memorial.
Turns out after the player succeeds at the chair puzzle, they are supposed to listen for a bird tweet and run into the wall. I kept watching deathbyzombie’s video and further in, he gets to a part where he’s supposed to follow an invisible maze, and if he falls off, he has to start over. He’s been using a tutorial for most of it, and after trying to legitimately follow the maze for a half hour, he realizes the other tutorial was using cheats so he installs a program that reveals the maze:
Turns out, this invisible maze is a massive winding maze with all sorts of twists, turns, and dead ends. Even being able to see the maze, it still took him a few minutes to run through it, I can’t even imagine how long it would take him if he was still trying to go through the maze legitimately. Just trial and error for hours. At this point, I wasn’t going to go through any of this trouble myself, so I kept watching to see how this ended. Something odd I noticed at the start of the game was the “P1” in the hud, insinuating there could be multiple players:
Turns out that’s only there so Muriel can log in as Player 2 from beyond the grave, and give the player the scary red message [DATA MISSING]. There was one last thing I noticed on DeathByZombie’s video:
There it is, I should have trusted my guts.
Maybe I went into this with the wrong expectations, or maybe I’m burnt out on the “someone else joins your game and they are dead” cliche, but I am kind of disappointed by this ending. I was hoping for more of a 3D platformer, or something that felt like an homage to the show, but instead it felt like to me that the game just used the recognizable characters and the recreation of the space to tell a meta story that didn’t have much to do with Courage, or Muriel. I think you could swap this story template over to any other Cartoon Network IP and the story itself really wouldn’t change. What if we took Ed, Edd, and Eddy, for example. The hard drive story wouldn’t have to change. The player would control Eddy, as he runs through an empty cul de sac. After finding enough question marks, one of the Kanker sisters would appear, and say “FIND THEM” and three jawbreakers would appear on the screen, never to become relevant again. Then Eddy would enter his front door, and be teleported to an empty void, where mailboxes were lined up in a ritual circle, and Eddy is forced to walk a long and winding invisible maze. Then Eddy would be teleported back to the cul de sac and Ed would connect as player one, and Edd would connect as player 3 and then their faces would get spookier and spookier until the screen went black. Then “[System32 Deleted]” would flash on screen and the game would close. My point is, Courage: the Videogame is not really a “Courage: the Cowardly Dog” Videogame -it’s an ARG cosplaying as a Courage game. I do enjoy some ARGs - for example the Cipher Hunt that Alex Hersch did for Gravity Falls. Here he used the ARG to get fans involved all over the world in something fun and collaborative and exciting. That mystery and discovery that’s associated with ARGs is very on brand for the show. But Courage: the Videogame doesn’t feel like it needs to be a Courage game, or even wants to be.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 10%
Time Played: 13 minutes
Sam’s Take:
I’m generally pro ARGs, and I kind of think a Courage ARG makes some sense. Augmented Reality Games tend to have some horror elements, because blurring the line between the game and reality is inherently a creepy idea. They also tend to have a silly energy around them. If you look up old forums of people figuring out the Inscryption ARG, people are having a blast going through the code and finding hints the developer left lying around. I think the strange horror-comedy stylings of Courage the Cowardly Dog lend themselves well to this type of game.
The thing about most successful ARGs though is that they hide behind a real piece of media. Inscryption’s ARG is hiding behind a real game that’s hiding behind another real game. Binding of Issac had an ARG, but people that didn’t know about it could play and enjoy Binding of Issac normally. Year Zero was an ARG based around a Nine Inch Nails album, and that was fairly successful. The point is, there almost needs to be a group of people just playing the game normally who aren’t in it, for an ARG to work. There needs to be a normal layer of dirt to dig under to find the buried treasure. Courage doesn’t have that first layer, it’s just a game with puzzles so obscure that you’d have to get a group or reach into the game’s code to figure it out. They do make up an excuse for this, saying that it was found as an already unfinished game that they just “made playable”:
The issue with this is that it’s an obvious lie. This screen basically screams “I’m actually a horror game! I’m going to pretend to be a real life thing!”. Binding of Issac Rebirth pretended to be an actual piece of legit dlc by… well by being an excellent actual piece of legit dlc. Courage is all sauce and no meal, and it really kills any sense of surprise. If you want something truly horrifying, watch all the videos in the comments of people pretending to be scared of the empty purple dog game for 30 minutes.
The amount of media destroyed by Five Nights at Freddy’s is truly astounding.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 4%
Time Played: 12 Minutes
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