My first load screen featured a “never fart on someone’s balls” tooltip. The first thing the game had me do was complete a quicktime event to poop in a toilet. Unsurprisingly, Cartman plays a central role in the story. As someone who didn’t find that story interesting or funny enough for one episode (let alone a trilogy), I wasn’t exactly looking forward to inhabiting those characters for an entire game. These personas are taken from the 2009 multi-episode arc around Cartman's alter ego, the Coon. The kids have abandoned the fantasy motif of the last game and adopted superhero alter egos as they search for a missing cat. For the first couple of hours of South Park: The Fractured But Whole, I had serious doubts. With a change in developers and the novelty value of playing through the world of the show gone, I was skeptical if a sequel would live up to the experience of the original. To the surprise of many, it turned out to be a great, lighthearted RPG that served as one of the best uses of a license in video games.
We had heard about Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s involvement throughout the development process, but we’d been burned too many times to get optimistic. After over 15 years of bad South Park games, fans of the show were understandably skeptical when The Stick of Truth was released.
