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—?”