Earth Must Die review

VValak Lizardtongue, Grand Shepherd of the Tyrythian Ascendancy, isn't a born leader. For one, he wasn't actually meant to sit on the throne—until he orchestrated the death of his very large brothers. Also: he's an idiot, a coward, and his sole advisor (and friend) is a tiny floating robot full of milk whose sole purpose is to nurse babies. Her name is Milky.

He's really the last person you want running the show when your home's being invaded by a bunch of weirdos from a very silly planet known as Earth. He's not the hero we need, but he's the only one we've got. The Ascendancy is screwed.

Developer Size Five Games has returned to its point-and-click roots after dabbling in football, stealth and platforming (though 2020's Lair of the Clockwork God was also half of an adventure game). Nostalgia is the name of the game here, with Earth Must Die simultaneously evoking the comedy puzzlers of the '90s along with vintage Cartoon Network and Adult Swim shows.

It is a rapid-fire gag machine where each scene is just as eager to spit out joke after joke as it is to get your little grey cells working. There are some incredibly inventive, playful puzzles blessed with brilliant high-concept setups, but at the same time it finds orgies, sex shops and genitalia as hilarious and baffling as you may have, when you were 14.

Earth Must Die will never say no to low-hanging fruit, which I confess did elicit a fair few chuckles out of me, because I am a very childish 40 year old. But it can also be a bit exhausting, especially when it undermines moments that would otherwise be pretty clever.

Take the quest to fix a large button. VValak needs to get one of his minions to scan for new planets to destroy. It's fun to destroy planets, but this is a practical concern, as this is the only way the Ascendency can get its hands on the pink goo that fuels it. After dealing with far too much bureaucracy, the scanning is ready to commence, but it's been so long that the connection between the scanner and the button to activate it has atrophied.

Naturally there is only one solution: infect the button with a microscopic civilisation programmed to fix it. Only, there's been a hiccup, which naturally means VValak and Milky must shrink down and investigate.

Unfortunately, this high-concept diversion immediately gets derailed. The micro-civilisation has built a sex shop, you see. Cue 10 minutes of tired gags, a puzzle that's largely spelled out for you (and really just involves talking to three people) and some very forced anti-capitalist commentary that makes me slightly embarrassed to be a socialist.

There are, thankfully, plenty of other instances where the gags get out of the way for long enough to give us some properly great puzzles. One of my favourites sees you playing Hitman's Agent 47 on a cruise: you end up causing carnage with more micro-civilisation hijinks and some teleporter tampering, which requires you to decipher an alien language and get to know the local fauna.

An alien orgy does threaten to derail things, with most of the jokes homing in on it, but here the gags at least attempt to complement the puzzles rather than shoving them out of the way so we can stare at the weird aliens sticking their tongues and antennae everywhere.

There are also a couple of running gags that set up some fundamental mechanics. Despite being centuries old, VValak has absolutely no curiosity about his empire. A newborn baby would be better informed. This is why you'll need to use Milky's frequently updated Milkypedia to give you hints about how to handle a given situation, whether you're negotiating with alien rebels or learning about what beverages humans drink. It effectively serves as an in-fiction hint system that you won't feel embarrassed to use.

VValak also refuses to touch things. The Grand Shepherd can't sully his delicate hands by touching anything that poor people may have dirtied up, so you always need to get others to do your dirty work for you. This usually means bossing Milky around, but you'll find other minions too. Giant mosquitoes, weird cabbage-chickens, a heist crew who you command via monitors—it's great stuff.

Though Earth Must Die is pleasantly compact—I finished in just shy of eight hours—it's full of conundrums, and while it might be a touch too eager to nudge you towards a solution, the vast majority manage to be creative and endearingly slapstick. And occasionally hyper violent.

Earth Must Die also has a helluva cast, drawn from some of my favourite British comedies. Joel Fry (Plebs, Our Flag Means Death), manages to make the imperial manchild VValack almost charismatic, while the likes of Mike Wozniak (Taskmaster, Man Down, and the brilliant Three Bean Salad podcast), Alex Horne (Taskmaster, The Horne Section) and Tamsin Greig (Black Books, Friday Night Dinner) have a lot of fun playing a variety of weird little aliens and robots.

We're not exactly inundated with good comedy adventure games these days, so Earth Must Die is a novelty that I can't help but feel fond towards. But it's also a slightly harder sell than, say, Dispatch, which despite the superhero setting takes a more naturalistic approach to its jokes. Earth Must Die comes more from the sketch comedy tradition—most scenes are self-contained vehicles for gags and puzzles, with plenty of hits but quite a few misses.

This certainly isn't a bad thing, though. Whenever something lands with a thud, the pace of the game means that you're only a couple of minutes away from an entirely new scenario, with more attempts to smash up your funny bone. And OK, OK, I did laugh at the alien orgy.