The Rocky Horror Show Video Game (Review)

The Rocky Horror Show Game
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Steam
Released October 20, 2024
Developed by Freakzone Games
$9.99 kept incorrectly adding the word “Picture” in the making of this review. It’s JUST “The Rocky Horror Show Video Game.”
The Nintendo Switch version was played for this review.

OH MY GOD! It’s…..It’s….. It’s the villain from Congo! Get ’em away from me! Yuck! I hated that f*cking movie!

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m friends with Freakzone Games, which is one guy: Sam. Now, I never factor friendships into the verdicts of my reviews, but I figure you should know that I like Sam as a person and as a game maker, in that order. That’s in contrast to the 1975 motion picture The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I don’t like at all. It bores me, but it’s nothing personal. I just don’t like musicals. I usually don’t watch them unless they involve Disney animation or, more rarely, giant carnivorous plants and evil dentists. Now I’m from a family of cinephiles and the lone hold out in my family for Rocky Horror fandom, so it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with it. Rocky Horror Picture Show for me is in the same boat as other “cult” movies like The Room or Manos: Hands of Fate (ironically another flick that Freakzone adapted) in that I have tried so many times to sit all the way through it and have never come close to finishing the film in a single sitting. It’s not for me, which in theory means the game isn’t for me, right? Well, it’s not that simple. Even if you’re not a fan, I can explain why you’ll want to keep reading with a single screenshot. This one:

Get it?

Actually, change that, because I meant “it’s actually a satire of games using a Rocky Horror foundation.” Don’t mistake this for Castlevania because it doesn’t play anything like any of those games. The gameplay is more like the Sega Master System/Game Gear classics starring Mickey Mouse that I genuinely think are some of the best 8-bit games ever. Specifically the 8-bit Castle of Illusion and Land of Illusion games (Legend of Illusion sucks) where you pick up crates that can be thrown at enemies or stacked for platforming. Take that gameplay concept and turn it into a death-count punisher and you have The Rocky Horror Show Video Game. The best thing I can say about Rocky Horror is that it confirmed to me that throwing crates at things is just about the most satisfying attack method a 2D platformer can have. It’s hard to screw up, and Sam didn’t. It controls great too. The two biggest things that he had to get right, action and play control, he nailed.

I died about, oh, one microsecond after this picture was taken.

The gameplay is little more than a skeleton for plenty of saucy humor and a satire on classic gaming at large. Yep, like his (fantastic) Angry Video Game Nerd games (has it really already been four years since I reviewed those?), Sam used Rocky Horror to poke those precious, precious memberberries with a stick. The Rocky Horror Show Video Game is overflowing with gags and direct homages on video games and game design. It apparently even kind of takes shots at the culture surrounding the Rocky Horror film. Sometimes it’s really subtle. I’m tone deaf so take this with a grain of salt, but I could swear I heard a tiny riff from the soundtrack of the Capcom NES classic Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers at one point.

There’s six of those disco balls in the game, which I think can become permanently out of reach if you die trying to get the crates to build a ladder to them. I got 3 out of 6 in my two sessions.

Now any satire like this is ultimately going to devolve into “hey, you know that thing you know about? I too know about that thing you know about and I made reference to it in my thing!” Sam isn’t THAT lazy about it and puts a small little twist on his references, but they are still just references at the end of the day. If you’re someone who laughs at those types of jokes without fail, you’ll probably like Rocky Horror even more than I did. That stuff doesn’t really land with me, but that’s kind of liberating because it allows me to focus on JUST the gameplay. For the Rocky Horror references, my sister Angela, a fan of Rocky Horror, was kind enough to watch me play and, while she had a valid criticism that I’ll get to later, she said that fans of the film will recognize lines, and the timing and delivery of the Rocky Horror-related humor was, more or less, on par with the film. Now whether fans of the film would want to play a punisher-platformer is another matter altogether. Angela was stunned by the genre. She thought the game would resemble something like Undertale, which would lend itself more to the film. “I don’t want to play a hard game where I’ll die a lot. I want a Rocky Horror video game experience. I won’t be able to finish this!”

I’m pretty sure there’s only three basic enemy types: the skeletons pictured here, brains that float at you, and ghosts that have what I assume is a famous scream from a sound library. It’s not a very big variety which is a bit of a bummer since the combat is satisfying.

As a raw video game, Rocky Horror is good but not great. It’s not at all gripping like the Angry Video Game Nerd 1 & 2 Deluxe was. The gameplay and level settings are too repetitive for that. Unlike AVGN, I really think the license here was too limiting for anything really imaginative. This is a standard point-A to point-B game with no items to find. There are health upgrades but they’re literally given to you at the start of stages or during one boss sequence. Only one boss is really played differently from the others, as it’s done like an avoider (this was the joke that landed best with Angela, though she missed the Donkey Kong joke that was attached to it). There’s no lives and no fail conditions. You can’t game over, so if you die, you restart from a nearby checkpoint, and the game is VERY generous with checkpoints. Rinse and repeat until you defeat Tim Curry three times and the credits roll.

After beating the game once, you unlock “new game plus” which pays homage to the midnight screening culture of Rocky Horror where people dress up and scream things at the screen. As far as gags go, I suppose this is a pretty fitting one. If you’re into that sort of thing. Angela suggested a “fill in your own dialog” option to be a true tribute to this culture.

My biggest knock easily is that the game gets off to a slow start. The structure of the film had to be obeyed, so the game starts with one character (representing two characters) hopping through some shockingly bland level design. That part had me very worried. The twist is that Rocky Horror has three playable characters, but while the gameplay is identical with all three, you’ll eventually replay some of the levels you already experienced, only with additional obstacles or enemies. For what it’s worth, that opening level that I thought was BORING actually becomes a very good stage when you factor-in all the stuff that will eventually be added to the replay later on with a different character. But this also means Freakzone Games sacrificed the first level to this concept. You can’t do that sh*t! The first level IS your first impression, and if it’s too bland, it could be the only impression you ever make. There’s nothing stopping a player from turning off the game and never turning it back on.

Sam, do you see me making games? No? Then DON’T DO MY JOB FOR ME! You stay in your lane, and I’ll stay in mine.

It’s also a really short game. Like, you should be able to finish your first play session in a couple hours at most, even if you die a lot, with a lot of that time eaten up by unskippable cut scenes. I died over 100 times and I still finished it in less time than it took to watch three episodes of Welcome to Derry, aka “why did we pass on Stranger Things?” Most of the level design comes down to stacking blocks to jump over walls or reach staircases or timing-based traps. Most of the obstacles aren’t enemies but rather spikes. Spiky balls that appear and disappear. Bigger spiky balls that fall from the ceiling when you get near them. The bosses are Mario 2/Castle of Illusion “throw the crates at the thing until you win” fights. Boilerplate stuff, but well-made boilerplate stuff. Seriously, if you want a perfectly decent platformer that costs $10 or less and will eat up three hours or less of your life (in theory I bet a person could beat this in an hour on their first try if they play well enough), this isn’t a bad choice for that just on its gameplay merits. The Rocky Horror theme or video game parodies that didn’t land with me could be the icing on the cake for you.

The other big “obstacle” is limiting the visibility to a spotlight that follows the player. I’ve never been a fan of this, but it’s fine here. It didn’t change my mind about this overused and overrated trope. It’s okay, or more accurately, tolerable in Rocky Horror.

Did I have fun? Yes, and since this wasn’t made for me, I guess that speaks volumes to how good Sam is at this, right? That’s assuming my original “not made for me” hypothesis is correct. But what would a Rocky Horror fan say about this? “I don’t get it,” said Angela. “Rocky Horror is defined by being a musical. Making a game that’s anything BUT a musical means it’s not really Rocky Horror, is it? It’s just something that looks like Rocky Horror.” But Angela isn’t a gamer and has no real vested interest in gaming history or culture. And NOW I get it. I was wrong about not being this game’s target audience. I either am or I’m a generation shy of that audience. What Sam did here isn’t made for Rocky Horror fans first and foremost. It’s a game for people like me who wonder “whose bright idea was it to make a Back to the Future NES game? That doesn’t work as an action game! It’s a f*cking fantasy romance! The structure is complete f*cking wrong for the type of game they made!”

And that’s really the thing about the Rocky Horror game. These sprites could have been for anything, for any movie license, and the same applies for the video game reference jokes that were made. The same jokes could have been made if this was a platformer based on It’s A Wonderful Life or Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Why not? The sprites just happen to look like Rocky Horror sprites because that’s the license Sam was using. I did have fun. I really did. But the actual gameplay of The Rocky Horror Show Video Game is as generic as it gets. Sorry, Sam. I hope you know I love you. Seriously folks, Angela and me have been working on a superhero TV show concept for years now, and if it were to actually get made as a TV show and we were to ever license it for THIS type of platform game (even though it wouldn’t work as that but this is a hypothetical), Sam would not only be my first choice for developer, but he would be my only choice. If we offer him the license to make our superhero show as this type of platforming game and he says no, the game doesn’t happen. Ever. That’s how much stock I put in his ability.

The joke is that if they had made a Rocky Horror game in 1988 to 1991 at the peak of the NES, it’d be like this, only without the swearing and innuendos. As a quick aside, I hate it when games like this cuss. I know that sounds weird coming from me, but it breaks my immersion that I’m playing a lost game from that era. Either way, Rocky Horror doesn’t fit the platforming genre at all. THAT’S THE JOKE. The fact that a decent game is attached to that joke is just a bonus. Rocky Horror didn’t sell well, but I think it could be rescued because point-of-sale eShops are not the way to sell this thing. What Sam and his partners on this project need to do is find a publishing partner who will distribute physical copies of this in places like Spirit Halloween or Spencer’s Gifts. Spencer’s actually has a board game section with satires like Tipsy Land (a drinking game version of Candy Land). Why not video game satires? At least, that’s how you land casual fans. For everyone else? Yeah, it’s going to be problematic.

I didn’t want to spoil this but I think I have to. The opening dialog is framed like Legend of Zelda, right down to the music sounding just similar enough to fire-up your memberberries. It’s well done. I think people who see THIS would immediately get “oh, this isn’t a Rocky Horror game. It’s a game satire with a Rocky Horror theme.” But it doesn’t mean squat if you can’t even get the target audience to view a trailer or click the eShop page. Even media coverage won’t make a difference with non-fans because, AGAIN, the non-fan still has to click through and stay focused long enough to find out IT’S NOT JUST ROCKY HORROR GAME! I don’t know how you do that. A different logo maybe? Maybe it can’t be done.

So like, how do you get the word out on games like this? How do you get someone who would like this type of parody but not a Rocky Horror game to click the game’s page on an eShop? How do you get someone who isn’t a Rocky Horror fan to click a trailer? Because, gang, those are the questions that need answers if we want this to be a viable genre, and I think we do, right? More importantly, if you want rights holders to famous non-gaming IPs to give small developers like Sam these big licenses to work with, SOMEONE has to figure out the answer to that, because I really want more indie devs to land these famous licenses. I want stuff like this to keep coming out. But if I hadn’t been friends with Sam, I’d never even given this game a second thought. A license by itself is only going to appeal to the fans of the license. That’s why you get the f*cking license in the first place, right? But, depending on the license, it can be just as much a barrier to your target audience as it is an attraction. With all due respect Sam, it’s not up to me or anyone in gaming media to get the word out that Rocky Horror isn’t ROCKY HORROR in capital letters. You have to do that……… somehow. How? I dunno. Hey, you’re the one who wanted this license. You figure it out.

I hope what I wrote about the game doesn’t make it sound bland or anything. When Rocky Horror finds its teeth, it’s a damn solid platformer. It’s not amazing, but it’s not average, either. Especially the home stretch with the wheelchair guy. FYI, it controls exactly the same. There’s no skidding or anything like that. It’s just a different sprite, but the challenge is pretty high once he shows up, and I enjoyed it very much. Sometimes I just want a simple, stupid, no frills platformer that controls perfectly, you know?

Every single maker of games who nabs a famous but audience-specific license, from AAAs to small indie studios, is going to face the same “getting the word out that our game is actually FOR EVERYONE” problem. The recent Garbage Pail Kids game certainly struggled with that. I have no idea how well GPK sold, but I don’t think it did great, even though it’s a very good video game. I LOVED IT, and I’m not a fan at all of Garbage Pail Kids as a franchise. For the studio and publishers behind Garbage Pail Kids, that sounds like a dream scenario, doesn’t it? Even a non-fan loved it! But the truth is, if I had not been a game critic, I would have never played Garbage Pail Kids. Judging by how the review has done, I don’t think many non-GPK fans have read it, either. I only started playing it because I thought I could get interesting content out of it. I had no clue how much I would like it. Maybe they’re proud I liked it and gave it a glowing review, but 99.99% of your audience isn’t making content. They just want a fun game for their money, and maybe your license isn’t the blessing you thought it was. How do you get someone who thinks Garbage Pail Kids are stupid but loves NES platformers to play a really well made NES platformer with a GPK license? Good question, and I don’t have the answer.

Same with Rocky Horror. If Sam and I hadn’t been friends for over a decade (he even put an IGC easter egg in his Spectacular Sparky game), I wouldn’t have played it. I had fun with these games, so presumably gamers like me, and I consider myself the average gamer, would enjoy them too regardless of their love or hate of the IP. I feel horrible that this didn’t find its audience, because I know that the potential pool of satisfied customers is massive. A solidly designed platform game? Excellent play control? Fantastic chiptune soundtrack (UPDATE: Angela could easily recognize several chiptune renditions of film’s songs, which this review originally mentioned but I accidentally cut that line. My bad!). Decent enough combat (wish there had been a bigger variety of it). Good challenge? Doesn’t wear out its welcome? Yeah, this is a good, solid game. I don’t even mind the length since the amount of obstacles and enemies is so limited. If he wasn’t going to add more, I’m happy he didn’t just keep recycling for the sake of padding the playtime. The worst thing I could say about Rocky Horror is that it’s a bit of a slow riser, which hurts a little since it’s such a short game, but that’s not a deal breaker. I liked this regardless of the license, but that might not be the win for Sam that it sounds like on paper. The license doesn’t target everyone, does it? It targets Rocky Horror fans. A movie famous for taking a long time to find its audience and not doing well upon release. I’m guessing Sam wasn’t aiming for THIS direct of a tribute.
Verdict: YES!