Review of “Death of the Reprobate” – a devilishly good foray into living paintings

I’ll never forget the day my uncle told me about his neighbor Malcolm’s cat. Partly because my family always manages to bring it up somehow whenever we meet, but mostly because Malcolm is indeed, by all accounts, a bit of a bastard (pardon the curse). Every day he would walk through my uncle’s cat flap, devour the two portions of food he had left out for his own pair of scaredy cats, then turn around and immediately leave. During certain retellings, he sometimes pees on the mat. Others throw up his guts.

I was reminded this week of Malcolm playing Joe Richardson’s latest Renaissance painting-to-life adventure game, Death of the Reprobate. In it you also play a guy named Malcolm the Shit, and I think they would get along great. Within seconds of starting, you’ll learn exactly how Malcolm got his unsavory suffix, dishing out all sorts of horrific punishments to petty criminals who dared to cross him. As they are wheelbarrowed into his throne room, Death of the Reprobate’s over-the-top dialogue immediately sets the tone for what is to follow, as a messenger arrives and says that your father, John the Immortal, is not of his name All in all, head out to visit him and hopefully claim your inheritance before his shoes explode.

But like father like son, old John knows what a stinking bastard Malcolm has become at court and tasks him with performing seven good deeds before sunset to prove he is worthy of his earthly riches. “The Lord will guide you,” you are told ambiguously, which is probably appropriate given the time and all these circumstances, but then you go outside and you see “The Lord” literally standing in the bushes in front of you and a big one Spike in hand holding shield above the head of your first, unwitting quarry. I suspect that the Lord does work in mysterious ways, it seems.

This begins your bizarre point-and-click odyssey, where you must help seven local farmers in the nearby backwater. Each of them has their very own cocktail of fetch quests and puzzle items to acquire before you can cross them off your to-do list and consider the job done. In other words, it’s a classic adventure game, albeit presented through the lens of comically repurposed real-life paintings, with characters, scenes and landscapes all thrown together to create a surreal but always entertaining village full of villains .

If you’ve played Richardson’s latest work, The Procession to Calvary, you know exactly what kind of absurd nonsense awaits you here. But for those who haven’t, this is art like you’ve probably never seen before – think “Pentiment” or “Please, Touch the Artwork” at their boldest and most irreverent, and then give it a spin continue to 11. Lightheartedly animated and armed with modern, clever jokes and remarks that people can insult you with. The wonderful mix of figures from the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Pre-Raphaelite periods has rarely felt more alive and never been more fun to look at and talk to.

Richardson has such a keen sense of humor and obviously silly exchanges between these famous faces that every image, wherever you look, is a sheer delight. Even in just a few playable scenes, it manages to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, from bickering saints and wealthy families besieged by their hordes of children to drunks endlessly peeing into bottles at the local tavern while their mates bet on monkeys playing dice in the corner. While it always tends to lean toward the dirtier end of this spectrum, let’s be honest: if you hover over a character, you’ll see that their name is simply “Creepy Fop” or “A Groaning Little Clap-Faced Brat.” is. Only those with a heart of stone could resist a secret little giggle. The music also helps a lot, because every room, every street and every apartment has its own accompanying choir of chamber musicians who sing in the background and treat you to artists like Mozart, Bach, Chopin and others. It’s really quite charming how it mixes low and high brow together in this way, and it creates a strong sense of place that permeates the game from start to finish.

Against this absurd background, Malcolm must begin his charity. He has three actions available to him that he can perform on any interactable object: look, talk, and touch (though the latter usually results in him punching some poor soul in the face or, if he’s feeling particularly generous, a small scratch on the head receives). You’ll need to use a combination of all three to puzzle your way to victory, and many require a fair amount of creative thinking to get the right results – just wait until you get to the cow and the bucket, that is all I want saying. However, if you get stuck, Death of the Reprobate doesn’t mince words when it comes to hints and tips on how to proceed. A very direct mystic will tell you very clearly what you need to do next to help someone, and I wish that wasn’t the case quite While these initial requests were so blunt, there’s something to be said for how respectful it is of your time and patience (though speed isn’t necessarily an issue here either, when you can watch the whole thing in just under three hours).

Admittedly, I was mostly at a loss because I didn’t even realize that I had missed an important clickable object, as the nature of its artfully constructed brushwork can sometimes make it difficult to figure out what is just part of the background and what isn’t. I’ve also started playing it on my Steam Deck, which by default forces you to use the somewhat fiddly touchpad and whose small screen makes it even harder to see such minute details. When I switched to my desktop, I found it much easier, if only because I had a real mouse and keyboard on hand, so I could press H or hold down the middle mouse button to highlight any interactive object in a given scene. However, this didn’t solve all of my problems, and one particular puzzle in the tavern resulted in me repeatedly glossing over important clues because my eyes simply didn’t register some very subtle character changes. I’m not going to lie, I felt like an idiot when I actually figured it out, but occasionally the look of a living painting can counteract the otherwise excellent puzzles.

My only other concern is that the script leans a bit too much into current meme culture for my liking, and I worry about whether it has what it takes to stand the test of time in the future. For example, there are moments where it’s ALL 👏CLAPING 👏HANDS👏EMOJI👏, while others rely on text-based emoticons like 😛 and ; fall back. Sure, they’re well received now, but will they still seem just as cute in five years? Ask me again in 2029 when my 40-year-old cringeometer will be in his element. But even in the here and now, some lines of dialogue can seem a bit too meme-like. So if you tolerate things like “Get rekt!”, that’s not a problem. is pretty low, Reprobate is probably not the game for you.

But even if the dialogue doesn’t always suit your taste, “Death of the Reprobate” is so convincing almost everywhere that it’s much easier to forgive the odd bastard. His bawdy and playful quests are infectiously cheeky, and his intelligently constructed puzzles will make you wish there were more unfortunates in need of Malcolm’s help. For times when you need a little laugh, Death of the Reprobate is probably one of the best remedies out there, and – like my uncle’s Malcolm the Cat anecdote – it’s certainly one of the Most memorable games I’ve played all year. Let the campaign to canonize Malcolm the Shit begin here, because this is truly heavenly.

A copy of Death of the Reprobate was provided for review by developer Joe Richardson.