The Thong Quest

I spent entire summers on Super Nintendo RPGs—Chrono Trigger, Lufia, Terranigma—replaying them obsessively, hunting for secret endings and hidden content, reloading saves just to see what lay outside the map boundaries. That took focus. That took absence. I was a different person then.

Now I’m the busy kind of adult: deadlines, emails, that low hum of the internet insisting I’m missing something. No possibility of that old surrender. No time to disappear into a single game for weeks.

One gray afternoon I scrolled the app store and saw DeathSpank. Ron Gilbert made Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, so it probably wouldn’t be garbage. I downloaded it without much expectation.

You’re a knight searching for magical thongs across a fairytale world full of goblins and witches. The side quests exist purely to make you laugh. The ending involves Christmas and makes no logical sense. It’s all deliberately stupid, committed fully to its own absurdity without any self-consciousness about it.

I played through Orphans of Justice and Thongs of Virtue in a few days. The games don’t pad themselves with filler or artificial length. They understand the specific amount of time someone like me has. You get in and out.

Then I heard The Baconing had come out, and I started it immediately. Like right now, actually, while you’re reading this. Assuming it hasn’t consumed every hour since. Because something about this series works in a way I’d stopped expecting from games.

A game that doesn’t demand your whole life is rarer than it should be.