There are few things funnier than a guy being confidently wrong. It gave us Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, Ben Stiller’s White Goodman, and Will Ferrell’s… well, a whole lot of Will Ferrell’s characters.
That unearned confidence is the attribute that led Ron Burgundy to claim that “diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War-era” and Ricky Bobby to take “If you ain’t first, you’re last” as his creed. Dudes loudly saying made-up stuff is a comedy archetype I grew up loving and Henry, the good-hearted lad at the center of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, is one of the best examples I’ve seen of this trope in video games.
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Now, Henry isn’t nearly as aggro as any of those early 2000s comedy leads. He’s closer to the Derek Zoolander end of the spectrum, whose heart is in the right place as he asks, “What is this? A center for ants?” He’s a nice guy who feels sad that his family was murdered and loves his dog. But when someone asks Henry to explain something, he often stumbles into the same pot of comedy gold.
This may well change as I get deeper into the game and level up his speech-related stats, but a dozen hours in, Henry has yet to answer a question correctly. It’s to the point that, even though I know his stat is too low and he’ll lose Reputation points for saying something stupid, I can’t help but make him give his take at every opportunity just for the comedy of it.
In a quest I recently started, Henry needs to track down saltpeter. A character asks him if he knows what it is, and he explains that, yes, it’s this thing when “You, ah, take a chunk of salt and pray to St. Peter to miraculously transform it?”
Later, Henry finds out that a Cuman character has a crush on a woman who doesn’t speak a lick of his language. Henry doesn’t speak Hungarian, either, but he offers to translate all the same, and insults the woman in the process. She gets mad, the Cuman guy beats him up, and I laugh.
Another time, he tried to remember the word for “purgatory,” and came up with the name “Crimbo,” which is “like hell, only the colors are different”, it’s “underground”, or maybe “in Prague?”
A Vividly Thick Dunce
This happens all the time. Henry attempting to answer simple questions is funnier to me than any actual comedy game I’ve played. He’s like if you were playing an amnesiac protagonist who had no reason not to remember things. He’s just like that.
In fact, it’s making me wish that more RPGs used player choice in this way. We can often choose the nice dialogue or the mean dialogue, the good action or the evil action. But I haven’t played many games where you get a bad outcome because your character has no idea what’s going on. The Outer Worlds had ‘stupid options, true, but Henry’s lines are much more specific. They paint a vivid picture of a completely befuddled mind.
Much of this working comes down to Tom McKay’s performance. He really sells that Henry believes that he’s Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire, reaching back into his memories for the answer. The only problem is the answer is usually rubbish. I tend to prefer a silent protagonist in a choice-driven RPG because I want to shape my character’s backstory, personality, and choices. But, occasionally, a developer hits upon the perfect middle ground character and a Geralt, Arthur Morgan, or Henry of Skalitz is born.
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I Want A Kingdom Come: Deliverance Set In The Future
KCD2’s tactile design could work in other settings, too.