Minimal Affect is a Mass Effect parody that doesn't look promising

Swedish studio Toadman Interactive have announced Minimal Affect, a cover-shooter space RPG that, yes, is intended to be a parody of Mass Effect. "But wasn't Andromeda already a parody of Mass Effect?" I hear you typing in the comments. Ha ha. Well done.

Minimal Affect is set aboard the Star Alliance ship Balding Eagle, where a crew of humans and aliens under the command of a man with a strong jawline and a head injury set out to save the galaxy and presumably crouch behind a lot of waist-high walls. The cast include a blue lady, a bug man, a Redshirt like off of that Star Trek, and literally just a krogan. They're all included in the trailer above, although someone seems to have left out the jokes.

"Minimal Affect is our homage to some of the greatest sci-fi RPGs, movies, and shows that we absolutely love," says creative director Rasmus Davidsson in a press release. "While the story is ridiculous, the gameplay certainly is not - this is a fully fledged action-RPG created in the art-style of adult animation you know and love. It’s a super galactic tale of space adventure, comedy, and questionable morality."

Minimal Affect will be out in 2021, at which point it will be roughly seven years too late to feel at all relevant.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.