Space Funeral

Space Funeral is a 2010 role-playing video game and art game by Irish developer thecatamites, Stephen Gillmurphy. The short game was created using RPG Maker 2003 and centers around a boy named Phillip, who leaves home to save his world from a mysterious corruption. Space Funeral is notable for its parodies of the horror and role-playing game genres, its crude art style, and frequent use of blood in dialogue, graphics, and thematics. Space Funeral begins with Phillip, a perpetually crying pajama-clad purple boy, seeing a wizard in Scum Vullage who tells him that his world has been “corrupted” and it does not have long left.

The wizard states that the only hope for survival is to find the City of Forms, a perfect city from which all things in the game’s world originate. Phillip departs the village and soon meets up with Leg Horse, a horse made of severed legs. During a boat ride to an area called the “Blood Cavern”, Phillip notices that certain objects appear as graphical glitches, which the denizens of the world are cognizant of and call “errors”, but do not remember what they once were before the “Great Change”. The player eventually passes through the cavern, reaching a wizard who demands to drink some of Phillip’s blood in exchange for guidance, though allowing the wizard to consume too much blood will lead to a game over.

The party is then ambushed by the game’s first boss: the Blood Ghoul, before entering the City of Thieves: a city home to a vast array of criminals (who have a strong weakness to Bibles). Players control Phillip (and during sections following the game’s first major area, Leg Horse) as he departs from his home in Scum Vullage to search for the City of Forms, a city described as the origin of everything within the game’s world. Throughout the game, players repeatedly encounter twisted and often bloody creatures, which take the place of non-playable characters (NPCs) in the game’s world.

The game plays like a typical 2D turn-based role-playing game (RPG), although a “Mystery” function that can only be used once per battle has effects unique to each enemy variety the function is utilized on. The effects of “Mystery” are typically humorous and have little bearing on gameplay: for instance, one such interaction causes Phillip to dance and become embarrassed. This ability closely resembles “praying” in Earthbound, but with a far greater and more prevalent narrative focus. Certain enemies have absurd weaknesses, such as silent films, making some of them sentimental. The game also has quirky status effects, such as “buff” and “sad,” along with more typical ones, such as “poisoned.”