Embodying The Mouthy Merc

Not every Twisted Pixel game is funny, but most of them are. Even the title of the sequel to its 2009 Xbox Live Arcade hit, ’Splosion Man – Ms. ’Splosion Man – is funny. There was a laugh waiting for you before you even started the download. The developer has always gone for the joke, even self-deprecating ones. In the opening to a few of its games, it would highlight its comparatively meager proprietary game engine, called Beard, with low-budget special effects and a severely overconfident challenge to Epic’s hugely popular engine by proclaiming, “Your move… Unreal.” It still makes me laugh every time I boot up a classic Twisted Pixel game.

Even as the studio embarks on what is easily its biggest game to date, using everything it has learned from being a VR-focused studio for the past eight years, it can’t help but make fun of itself for the sake of a joke. In the announcement trailer for Deadpool VR, while the teaser is finishing up and sharing a release window, acclaimed actor Neil Patrick Harris (who is taking on the role of Deadpool here) says, "Spider-Man gets Insomniac, and I get this s---?"