Brontë Games presents Wuthering Heights

The (Brontë) April Fool's Day joke of the day comes from RPGamer with this ineffable description of a Wuthering Heights game:

If I were to say that I was surprised upon receiving the latest offering from Bronte Games, it would be a criminally lax understatement. After such flops as Villette II and Jane Eyre X-Treme Go-Kart Challenge, my doubt in the once great publisher of mid-90’s licensed games was understandably shaken. I’d read the preliminary reports from Japan, and they were guarded, but positive. While I may not agree with my sushi-eating counterparts on all of the finer points, there is some truth to their words.
When a noble, yet politically unstable aristocrat flees the unfriendly streets of London for the rustic moors, he finds himself embroiled in a web of dark passions, mysteries dredged from the past, and wild, fruit-chomping action. A top-down, shooter-RPG that would not be out of place at a wedding joining the Xenosaga series with Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Wuthering Heights represents a bold step in the evolution of survival horror. Eliminating the inventory management that is often the focus of such games, the player is instead confronted with a parade of delicate social situations that quickly ramp up in misery and violence until there is no recourse but to stare at the wallpaper in resignation at the leaden pressure suffusing the atmosphere. (...)
Despite its flaws, I can’t help but respect Bronte Games for their decision to port Wuthering Heights to America. While it won’t win any awards for furthering the video-games-as-literature argument, it’s a fine way to spend the occasional night where the moon is obscured by reaching, claw-like branches. Moreover, it is clear that the localization team spared no expense in making sure that audiences stateside would be able to understand the complex Relationship Grid system. In addition to a faux leather relationship flowchart, the game comes with a dense manual that weighs in at over 300 pages. It’s attention to detail like this that makes Wuthering Heights worth your time if you’re able to push today’s flashy games out of your mind for long enough to appreciate the lengthy reward scheme that was the nourishing milk of yesteryear’s gaming elite.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune mentions a very proper April Fool's Day kind of book: "The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes" which includes the Jane Eyre run for president story that we already presented some time ago.

Categories: Humour, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights