You'll never guess what you can do at a funeral in Don't Ruin A Funeral

At the celebration of life for a dearly departed loved one, haven't you ever just wanted to go up to the well-meaning man of the cloth officiating it and deck him right in the kisser, sending him ragdolling into a nearby mausoleum?

Me either, that's extremely antisocial behavior, but videogames allow us to traverse the forbidden mindscapes of the collective unconscious, to indulge in our most lurid and forbidden fantasies. In Don't Ruin a Funeral by JackMcPhersonGames, buddy, you're gonna be ruining a funeral or two.

This indie game is available for free over on itch.io, and you can even play it in your browser. You spawn at the titular funeral for some unnamed fellow traveller on the road of life, and roll a die to determine which of six forbidden actions you'll take to disrupt today's service: punch, shoot, flip, kiss, dance, or bite. Once you've ruined the funeral, the game quickly resets to its default state, beginning the fun all over again.

The star of the show is absolutely the unnamed protagonist's Golden Gloves-ready haymaker. The nondescript rapscallion can ragdoll an entire group of mourners, adding injury to insult with a debilitating aoe crowd control effect. The flip move is fun too, and the crowd was weirdly horrified by smoochin', in a way they weren't by anything else. It turns out love is the most surefire way to ruin a funeral.

As a Unity game where you do very silly, gif-able things for the shiggles, one might call Don't Ruin a Funeral a "physics game" or some other such nonsense. I'm not so sure. With its isometric perspective, transgressive moral choice system, and reliance on dice rolls, I'd contend it's a hardcore CRPG, standing tall alongside genre luminaries like Divinity: Original Sin or Pillars of Eternity.

Ok, maybe not, but Don't Ruin a Funeral is certainly a fun little project, well worth checking out.

On the game's itch.io page, it has a quote with a fake IGN attribution:

"'Don't Ruin a Funeral is a magnificent game in pristine 26k, with breaking edge graphics and mechanics. A wonder of its time' - IGN, probably? I don't know."

Allow me to dispel all ambiguity: Don't Ruin a Funeral is a magnificent game in pristine 26k, with breaking edge graphics and mechanics. A wonder of its time. - PC Gamer, definitely.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.