Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan (Zero Punctuation) 

Watch this week's episode of Zero Punctuation on Stray. www.escapistmagazine.com/stray-zero-punctuation/ Watch it early and support our content via RU-vid Memberships for just $2/month. ru-vid.com/show-UCqg5FCR7NrpvlBWMXdt-5Vgjoin

You know, I’m sure Yahtzee thought it through when he mentioned that he reviewed this partially because it was gifted to him on Steam, but I can only imagine the flood of games he’s going to have gifted to him now in hopes that he’ll review them

Yes, everyone mentioning the fact that Yahtzee basically handed down a "how to make me review a game" are correct. But the prospect of Yahtzee reviewing Microsoft Word has way too much meme potential to ignore.

Yahtzee being called "A friend to all of god's creatures" is probably the funniest joke that ZP has ever produced.

If this drought continues im sure we will get a Yahtzee retrospective of the Putt-Putt game series from Humoungus Entertainment. Come on game industry throw us some spukgargleweewee stat.

Clever yahtz, basically giving everyone permission to bribe you with free video games to try to get you to review something.

Wait, Calarts animation style? Defeating your enemies by talking them through their issues? That's just the premise of Steven Universe

Rainbow Billy might have sneakily managed to put in some surprisingly deep gameplay mechanics considering how much there was to say about them during this week's ZP.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that Billy looks eerily like a Steven Universe version of Maxwell from the Scribblenauts games?

I'm getting pretty sick of cutesy colorful indie games turning out to by someone's dying dream or a metaphor for some disorder. Can't we just have the odd sparkly rainbow platformer or resource management game that DOESN'T end in finding out the protagonist is tortured? Can't it just be a funny cartoon world with a relaxing premise and no pretense that leads to a distinct feeling of regret for letting the ending play out? It started with Drawn to Life and it just keeps happening. The last game with that visual style that DIDN'T end with the a child's death I played was Hatty Time, and I am desperately hoping for another game like that at some point.

You can tell when Yahtzee liked a game because he spends more time explaining the mechanics of it.

The year is 2098. Yahtzee has been cyborgified and connected to the Ultra Web, ever at the forefront of cynical, yet deeply insightful, video-game critique. ZP videos STILL struggle with equalizing the audio of its super loud intros and outros.

3:18 "I'm sad" "Don't be sad" "But I am sad" "That's fine, it's perfectly normal to be sad"

2:55 Is that an image of a real imp plushie?? I want one!

As an animator, i can say this much about the Calarts style: Some people will get really offended if you say it is a thing, while some get offended if you insist it isn't, making for an annoying debate. It commonality is better attributed to being easier to animate rather than a conspiratorial lack of imagination. But like any style (official or not), it works best as long as you use it appropriately (and with good writing or fun scenarios). Imagine this show but with Ben talking directly to the camera for 5 minutes with annotations at the bottom of the screen instead of the iconic yellow backdrop slideshow we all know & love, and you'll get what i mean. It just doesn't have the same effect. Same goes for Steven Universe & The Amazing World of Gumball. Thanks for reading.

OMG I loved when he snuck in all those Nokia N-Gage's! That's a device I haven't thought about in forever.

I would legit tune in for Zero Punctuation reviews of production applications lol

I saw bluey in there. And now I’d kill to hear Yahtzee review random Bluey episodes.

It's very appropriate that this game was gifted to him, the gray-scaled avatar of cynicism, given the content of the game itself. Somebody must have unlocked what Gift he needed and was doing this to level him up. Please stop. He's becoming too powerful.

I, for one, would be massively excited if next week's ZP was a review of Microsoft Word. That'd be hilarious 🤣

I really love rainbow billy. I played it day 1 and during a really hard time in my life. It was a helpful processing tool. If I have a really hard day I’ll pick it up for a few hours.

Yahtzee's Google Image search history: "disgustingly adorable plush toys"

Man, I just love that weird Garfield toy. I'm so glad he's in your friendship combat party

Fingers crossed that Yahtzee might review Warhammer 40k Mechanicus since he's not being so picky about games being recent these weeks.

You know while I appreciate people want to put mental health in the spotlight, but theres few story turn offs bigger than "tries to say something big and helpful but is instead incredibly trite and borderline patronizing" so I kinda wish it writers would be alright just making a story thats fun.

Wow, never would've expected to see a Bluey plushie/indirect reference in a Zero Punctuation video lol

If this gets any more desperate, he’ll have to actually do Inscryption

I'm really hoping that indie games doing the "and it was all a metaphor for depression" doesn't become the next "..and then she woke up!"

Yahtzee must've liked it, he didn't even dry heave the unnecessary colon in the title.

It would be nice if these emotional games had a tag name, like I really want to play a game to just get lost from thinking about emotions and such, so it would be nice if such things were easier to dodge for those who just want to have fun

ZP review of Word would be awesome. Especially the battle against the grammer checker.

Yahtzee, tossing out the fact that he's the George Carlin of our age at the top of the review and just moving along. What a class act.

You know, I'm starting to think this drought is God's way of telling Yhatzee to finish Elden Ring and give it a full review

Fun fact: Back in the 2000s-early 2010s, art styles along the lines of Young Justice and Thundercats 2011 were considered "CalArts." Only after Gumball and Steven Universe came out did the bean style become "CalArts" to people who don't know about art style trends in entertainment.

Just a note to the graphics of the video: they are often mostly in the lower 1/3 of the screen and therefore can not be seen well if subtitels are enabled. Which sometimes is a bit sad for me as a non native speaker who uses subtitels. Not sure if that is a common problem.

I remember getting a ton of ads for this game on twitter and i was interested in it, yet i completely forgot it existed until now lol

2:50 Every year I see Bluey getting more and more recognized and it just makes me smile.

I work at a games store and I literally never heard of this game until yesterday. That says a lot about how much attention the game got and about Yahtzee's almost uncannily good timing.

0:23 Based, never stop. The worm was a fitting choice, too

I'd love to see yahtzee do a zp on Trespasser, if he haven't already. Maybe it can even be an episode for "Special moments in gaming history that no one learned from".

If you want a really obscure recommendation, check out Mad Rat Dead - it's a rhythm platformer of all things

Ngl, it kinda grinds my gears when people refer to an art style as Calarts when the term itself was originally by Prickfalusi to malign the aesthetic of Disney's Atlantis.

WAIT, YAHTZEE IS ACCEPTING GIFTS?? SOMEONE GET HIM ULTRAKILL, STAT!

I love they pick THAT Garfield doll...

"Serial kitchen appliance molester" smells like a frank Zappa reference

Y'know, dropping that Rainbow Billy's world might be [REDACTED] makes me all the more interested in this game. After all, I enjoyed (and had my face destroyed by) Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, and I'm a sucker for MRPGs, so I might just have to try it out.

It's funny how he mentions that this game slipped under people's radars and disappeared into obscurity. Meanwhile, I was jealous of the attention it was getting as we both released our games at similar times 😂

Giant evil dragon - Moray Eel with Mustache and Tophat.... XD

Is this game’s twist that the entire story is a metaphor for Billy being gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, and his dad is under the impression that that’s something that can be removed through behavioral conditioning? Because that’s the vibe I’m getting from this.

it's depressing to put a lot of effort in a game then no one knows it exists. at least if my game sucks there are people talking about it.

There's kind of a reason it get slept on: it's a Kickstarter game. I didn't know that before I played it, but hoo boy is it obvious in retrospect. Not all Kickstarter games are bad obviously, but it's got the flaws of throwing too much in and not being able to be everything they wanted in, conversely.

I think people overlooked it because it's basically the plot of The Lego Movie.

I still haven't decided if hearing about a game for the first time from ZP is a good thing or a bad thing.

I tried the demo for this and it was so saccharine that It felt like it was patronising me. Throughout the demo I was just waiting for any sign that there was more to this than the milquetoast slush it was putting my way, but the demo ended before I saw anything like that. It's almost like Undertale with no self awareness at all. If that experience was shared by thousands of people, that would be the reason why nobody wanted to buy it. Hell, even if somebody did buy it without trying the demo they'd probably ask for a refund before too long.

Wow the Cuphead DLC looks way different from what I remembered it looked like…

If you want something to fill in the game drought, I’d recommend you check out Into The Breach. It’s from Subset Games, the creators of FTL: Faster Than Light. And like FTL, Into The Breach recently got a content update and iPad version. I think you’d have some interesting things to say about it

I appreciate the use of Miyabi knives in this episode. I'm sure that was planned and Yahtz is a secret connoisseur of cooking knives.

Interesting that he went with a Teletubby joke for Rainbow Billy's design rather than say....the munted step-brother of the Scibblenauts protagonist.

There's something so funny to me about stabby weird Garfield plush.

Oh deary me, we’ve entered the time of the year where there’s nothing to review, a gaming drought as it were.

I always watch these to the end in case Yahtzee has an announcement for a new book.

I literally picked this up at GameStop. It was on clearance for less ten dollars. Best ten bucks I've spent.

2:42 Yahtz seems to have a fondness for Henry IV and I respect that

I found Bug Fables to be a nice spiritual successor to Paper Mario

You have GOT to review factorio! It's not in early access anymore and manages to have its cake and eat it too by being both a truly infinitely scalable sandbox as well as having a distinct linear story-like experience. Factorio doesn't so much tell a story as it does seamlessly guide you along solving progressively more complex logistical challenges all by yourself as you build your very first spaghettifactory. Despite being a hugely complex game, the best way to get into it is actually just to start playing without looking up any guides or anything, the game's learning curve is so perfectly sloped and there's so many potential solutions to all the different challenges that looking up guides is so unnecessary it can actual spoil the experience by robbing you of the problem-solving and just showing you sets of designs that work quite well. You'd love it, yahtz, you'd be mainlining freebase cracktorio within three days

Ahhhhhh...that is the stuff. Pure Yahtzee snark dribbling into my ear like sweet nothing from a prom date.

*"Teletuby Balaclava"* i don't know why but this word really cracked me up for some reason

The islands being represented by Tracy Island from Thunderbirds makes me happy.

The line about dental hygiene came as I was trying to twist the cap off a bottle of Listerine with my teeth because I was holding my phone to watch this with the other hand

You just reminded me that I never beat Bug Fables, I'd completely forgotten about it.

Then the next day Yahtzee woke up to dozens of Steam gifts clogging his inbox.

My friend Billy had a ten foot willy. He showed it to the girl next door. She thought it was a snake, So she hit it with a rake, And now it's only four foot four.

Zero Punctuation emo track of the week: *Typing Up My Suicide Note* by the *Invisible Walls*

The funniest thing about this review is that, despite the fact that Yatzhee mentioned the current abortion situation in the US, the most dangerous thing he said was that he reviewed a game because someone gave it to him as a gift. That's even more dangerous than re-reviewing a game.

At first I thought the worm was a "can of-" joke, but now I stew over it I think it's a "The Wall" reference...

Yahtzee opening with a jab on banning abortion - "Well, this comments section should be interesting..."

For the end credit animation: That is not what animal husbandry means.

My one take away from this is 'we can gift you games?!?'

This is reminding me of Indivisible, that one Wannime game you reviewed a while back. Also inspired by Undertale, and of course it is, that game is genuinely good so of course people would be inspired by it.

The way you discribe it sounds like pokemon and silence of the lambs

I love how the villain's voice is nearly Victor Casin's and hey, don't knock banana stickers. They're psychological validation.

I wonder if Yahtzee will talk about Omori now he's played it? It's a couple years old, but he DID re-review No Man's Sky...

This game sounds like it goes so out of its way to be inoffensive that it ends up being insultingly offensive. If I wanted to play a game where a kid goes into a world of make believe to cope with trauma, I’d play Omori, or Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.

When I discovered ZP--eight goddamn years ago man time flies when society is collapsing--I would occasionally have to pause the video to laugh myself lightheaded. That doesn't really happen all that often, I guess I've gotten used to it, but I had to have a little chuckle at "[indistinct monkey noises]" That got me.

I would absolutely watch him review computer software that isn't games

Industrial Level Alpaca Husbandry... isn't that one of the titles on your "to review" list?

First it was McDonners now it's Kentucky Fried Darkness. I'd say we're trying to start up horrifying food franchises if the real counterparts were not already vying for that honor by selling what they think is actual food

"Oh god, this is going to be a metaphor, isn't it?" Which one was it? Death, Coma or Escapism?

As someone that is tired and entirely repulsed of its esthetic I can understand why it slipped under the radar.

Please review stray, it’s a pretty good game which id like to see *torn to shreds*

Weird how he ended that first example without mentioning guns

2:37 Mario Sunshine did this with a level called "Eely Mouth's Dentist"

I think I've commented a few times over the weeks about this drought, but yeah, it feels like the worst I've personally ever experienced.

I'm a fan of the Magic the Gathering references. *Thanks for the Content* !

Again I don’t get how CalArts style got mixed up with modern day animation trends like bean smiles. The first person to bring up CalArts style was John K of Ren and Stimpy fame-he called the Disney style of keeping things on model the CalArts style as a derogatory term because he was so far up his own ass that there couldn’t possibly be more than one way of animating anything. Considering that’s not what they are taught in CalArts (modern animation trends) I don’t understand how it got mixed up there.

I'm pretty sure the eye stabber is using a kai shun knife, very good taste.

Damn, that game on Steam has 11 recent reviews and 55 reviews overall. You are beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel by now, you are scraping the barrel that came next in line after your current barrel.

Zero Punctuation angry punk rock track of the week: *Preventable Death And Wire Coathangers* by *Kentucky Fried Darkness*

So at this rate how long till we get a beat saber review? lmaoooooooo

I'm overwhelmed by the recent releases I'm interested in playing soon and yet somehow Yahtzee is still in a drought