In the 2000s, Newgrounds was a crucial pillar for young creatives, providing a platform to hone their animation and video game design skills. Unsurprisingly, many figures in today’s game industry built their followings and prolific careers on Newgrounds. While it was sometimes home to controversial content like Kindergarten Killer, it also fostered genuine hits like Friday Night Funkin’ or Alien Hominid.
The adventure game genre is the most flexible. Any kid on Newgrounds could craft their own game. Technically every game could be an adventure since doing anything could be a quest for someone. If you have a story to tell, it did not take much to convey it in Adobe Flash and Newgrounds had no shortage of experimental adventure games.
As time passed, Newgrounds cadets became middle-aged adults and Flash stopped being supported. What if one of these scrappy visionaries didn’t stop and sought to create his magnum opus? A lone rag-tag animator who aspired to make something truly epic that fully embodied the punk and rebellious spirit of the 2000s era humor with the maturity and wisdom that comes with age and life experiences? Find out in our Repella Fella review!
Repella Fella
Developer: Misadventurous
Publisher: 2 Left Thumbs
Platforms: Windows PC
Release Date: June 5, 2023
Price: $17.99
Repella Fella is about an exterminator who luckily finds himself in someone else’s doomsday shelter after Russians drop bombs on Australia. The exterminator has nothing but time before he is released when the life support systems finally expire. His stay lasted about a decade and a half due to the time distortion barrier of the survival shelter, but the rest of the world carried on for over a hundred years.
By the time the unnamed exterminator is set loose in the strange new world, everything he’s known is gone or changed. He is a man out of time and it happened without him ever seeing it happen. In a way, it is like a metaphor for the way we lose track of time when we grow up and lament where our youth went.
His easy-going life as an exterminator in Australia becomes a brutal fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world… and it always manages to keep the chuckles flowing because, in real life, stupid things can happen.
There are three protagonists in Repella Fella: Anya, the Russian MSS Private; Matilda, a Russian-Australian Agent; and the unnamed exterminator who seems like he may be an expy of the game’s developer. As the saga unfolds, sometimes the perspective will shift to one of these characters, but the exterminator is the emotional anchor of this story that holds it all together.
As the saga unfolds, sometimes the perspective will shift to one of these characters, but the exterminator is the emotional anchor of this story that holds it all together. In the interest of preserving the element of surprise of the story and keeping spoilers to a bare minimum, this review won’t go in-depth into the story.
The broad strokes are focused on the exterminator’s quest to find his place in a world where he does not belong anymore. It has some elements of a Jason Bourne movie and South Park… a lot of Repella Fella‘s DNA is influenced by South Park‘s sense of sharp, yet crass humor.
Repella Fella is a comedy game first and foremost and while it does have an effective emotional core, its primary goal is to entertain. The comedic sense of timing to some of the violence and line delivery is pitch-perfect.
Since this is a point-and-click adventure game, the developer takes advantage of this by giving players a lot of funny choices that pay off in hilarious ways or a laugh-out-loud game over.
Consequences are mercifully low stakes since any bad choices that end the game can be retried. This is encouraged because Repella Fella‘s strength is its comedy and animation.
There are a lot of missable scenes too, and trying to see it all can be challenging because there are points in the story where players will have to specialize in a stat. This will lock out options later down the road, and this is also applied to some resources that can be depleted as well.
It would have been nice if there was a branching map of the story for replaying chunks after beating the game. This would have made it easier to revisit sections to do events differently.
Repella Fella came from a very personal place and has a very distinct voice. This is a large reason why this game is packed full of soul and personality, which makes it very easy to connect with on an emotional level.
Repella Fella is one of those games that could have only come from one person making a game all by themselves but this one has the distinction of having unbelievably professional and high-quality animation to realize the artist’s vision.
The visuals stand out and don’t resemble video game graphics at all. The humor and visual style are where most players will make the South Park connections, but after a while, Repella Fella begins to feel like its own thing. There is an unspeakable amount of details and art assets of individual items or objects to inspect with jokes hidden within.
The amount of animation and elaborate setpieces combined is roughly the length of a full TV season’s worth. At times, Repella Fella can feel more like an interactive cartoon given how lengthy some of the animated sequences can be. Thankfully it is never boring and it earns its place as being one of the better Tell Tale-like story-driven games.
The voice acting is exceptional. Characters sound very natural and don’t perform like typical commercial voice actors where they over-annunciate.
The entire cast gives a soulful performance, but the protagonist stands out as the best of them all. He has a very complex role and must balance a mix of dramatic and comedic. This is probably because it isn’t acting and the character and his performer are effectively the same person.
Not everything in Repella Fella sticks to landing. As the story builds to its climax, the final stretch happens very quickly and leaves loose ends. It feels as if the game is about to begin another arc but then decides not to commit. It was distracting enough that it left me questioning what the point was.
Repella Fella is an enthralling epic packed with lots of brutal, yet hilarious violence and very Australian humor. If you grew up with Newgrounds and South Park during the Y2K days, you’re going to feel right at home. The point-and-click adventure gameplay is simple enough that you won’t need to manage inventory or worry about different cursors or verbs. The experience is very casual and the most players will have to worry about is the choices to make as the story unfolds.
The comedic references were tasteful enough to not be obnoxious and the writing puts characters front and center to carry the story. By the time it is over, it can feel like you got to know the developer on a personal level like he just unloaded a ton of personal issues in the form of a video game.
Anyone interested in a laid-back comedy adventure game with a soul will have a lot to chew on with Repella Fella. It is a surprisingly lengthy and epic game that is twice as long as you’d expect and feels like bingeing a short season’s worth of episodes or an exceptionally long animated film.
Repella Fella was reviewed on a PC (via Steam) using a code provided by 2 Left Thumbs. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Repella Fella is now available for PC.
