Warning: Spoilers for both Death of the Reprobate and Die Hard With A Vengeance lie ahead.
One day, you’re just living your life, and then bang, some dickhead has to come in and mess everything up.
For the protagonist of Death of the Reprobate – a point-and-click indie game that’s one big collage of wacky renaissance paintings – it’s a messenger being wheeled in on the bad boy’s barrow, interrupting some lovely execution orderings to tell him that his father, Immortal John, is dying.
For John McClane, in Die Hard With A Vengeance, it’s an unknown baddie blowing up a department store, and then ringing up the NYPD demanding to take to the suspended detective who once dropped Professor Snape out of a window near the top of the Nakatomi Plaza.
For both, it’s a bit of a bummer. Driven by a desire to weasel into some nice inheritance in one case, and by the fact that lives on the line are more important than a hangover in the other, the pair head off to heed their respective callings.
Both are forced to meet with men they hate, but who have power over them, in the forms of Walter Cobb and Immortal John, in packed meeting rooms filled with these two figures’ various cronies. Then, the job begins. For Death of the Reprobate’s protagonist, it’s to do seven good deeds for the townsfolk, in order to prove that you aren’t just some selfish, godless wanker. For McClane, it’s to head off to Harlem wearing a sign designed to get him killed, with the threat from the mysterious Simon that more destruction will be wrought if the instruction isn’t followed.
It’s a crappy situation, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. And the good news is, both men are set to be supplied with a mate who has links to a god to help guide them through the tough tasks ahead.
For DOTR’s protagonist, it’s a literal fellow resembling the lord himself, dangling little signs indicating who needs a favour doing for them from a little fishing rod. McClane, meanwhile, has his life saved by Samuel L Jackson’s Zeus Carver, named after the Greek god of thunder, and cursed from then on to follow the divorced cop on his painful pilgrimages to various locations across the city.
An array of different challenges await these poor fools, as they voyage from point to point in the surrealist nightmare that is New York’s urban jungle, and a relatively mundane by comparison fictional town constructed entirely from the landscapes, portraits, and other doodles of artists like John Everett Millais, Willem Koekkoek, and David Teniers the younger.
Some, like McClane’s trip to Harlem, and Immortal John’s heir’s quest to find some apparel that’ll allow some men to engage in a bit of gentle bottom fisting out in the country air without traumatising the locals, involve clothing. Some, like the water jug puzzle McClane and Zeus have to do to prevent a bomb going off in a park and the bit of monkey dice roll estimating DOTR’s main character has to do when he visits the tavern, involve the kind of maths you hated at school.
Some involve children, like the house full of screaming, crying, and hungry tykes yelling toff like ‘Feed me!’ that DOTR’s protagonist has to find a way to settle down, or like that bomb Simon says he’s planted in a school which leads Cobb and co on a city-wide search. Some, like the train bomb McClane just about manages to detach before it rolls into a packed station, are designed to be impossible to accomplish by conventional means, which is why he probably wishes he could be handed a magic flute by a goat king, like DOTR’s protagonist is.
Getting through all of this – including solving the riddles given out by Simon in one case and some weird people blocking entry to a forest in the other – is all about thinking outside the box, doing the unexpected, or the blatantly obvious in a couple of cases. It’s mental gymnastics, right up until the moment everything flips on its head.
In McClane’s case, he starts to figure out what Simon – real name Peter Gruber – is up to. He’s not out just to scare everyone and avenge his brother, he’s also here to steal a ton of cash, a bit like DOTR’s leading man. After nearly being drowned twice – once inside a dam, and then when Gruber sinks him and Zeus aboard a ship filled with slag – McClane is probably less of a fan of things being filled with water than the lady who wants you to turn a well into a hot tub in DOTR.
With all of this over, it looks like our protagonists have both run all over town for nothing. DOTR’s poor fella has to listen as his mean Uncle Vladimir twists all of his good deeds into sins in his relaying of them to the about to kick the bucket Immortal John, resulting in him being denied that precious inheritance. As McClane and Zeus are brought ashore, Gruber and his cohort escape with the stolen money.
But it’s not over. McClane discovers the location where his foe is headed via a bottle of aspirin Gruber threw him, in one of the most ‘I’m literally shouting at my telly’ bad guy blunders of all time. At Immortal John’s funeral, the real god himself intervenes,m refusing to let the game end this way.
And so begins a mad chase, both to a truckstop north of the US border and to start an apocalypse on the painted world. Birds are shot, swarms of locusts are unleashed, choppers are scrambled, and eventually both McClane and DOTR’s protagonists end up facing their respective devils head on, but as underdogs. Being heroes, albeit flawed ones, they get away.
But their tales don’t end there. For McClane, there’s an awkward phone call to be made to Holly Gennaro. For DOTR’s protagonist, there’s some form of eternal damnation.
Because the moment the camera stops rolling isn’t the end to things for these characters. They’re just living their lives in the narrative version of that weird armpit of the year between Christmas and the turning over of the calendar.