Hitting the left shoulder lets you do a ballet pirouette that dodges all incoming gunfire, and clicking the left stick lets you enter slow-mo which allows an even greater degree of acrobatic movement. Your character naturally flips and wall jumps with an impressively fluid animation, and you can keep firing your guns as you somersault through the air. You earn points by making the most of the game’s various parkour mechanics, which are designed to make you feel like an action hero. You’ll also be treated to an action-replay of the “coolest” kill you did. At the end of each level though, you’ll receive a grade based on how quickly you completed the level, whether you managed to kill every enemy and also an overall point score, based on your performance. Enemies have flimsy AI and don’t pose much threat, and your deaths will mostly be attributed to environmental hazards like bottomless pits. The game’s levels are not particularly difficult to get through. This is a game about stylishly killing enemies in order to rack up points. Don’t get me wrong – My Friend Pedro is certainly very well made, and enjoyable, but it just gets me thinking.
The game’s mechanics align the two far too clearly, and much more so than in any other Devolver indie title I’ve played to date. But I can’t shake this interpretation: to enjoy this game, you must simply enjoy being the perpetrator of violence. I make this digression on game violence because I spent my entire playtime of My Friend Pedro desperately trying to squeeze some meaning from it to grasp some kind of profound, thought-out perspective. But on the other hand, I think we’ve been able to have much more mature, honest and sobering discussions of violence, precisely because video games are able to represent their impact better than film or prose. While I don’t agree that video games cause violent behaviour, I definitely think that prolonged exposure desensitises players to the depiction of violent acts. And into the mix we can then consider games like Hotline Miami and Overgrowth – games which portray violence as something dark and defamiliarising, as a last resort to ensure personal survival, and yet sickly, intoxicatingly gratifying. It’s not uncommon for games as a medium to use extreme violence for the sake of comedy – we see examples like No More Heroes and Dead Rising from Japan and everything from Bulletstorm to Borderlands in the west – and it seems as if comedic hyperviolence is much more prevalent in games than any other medium. The game conjures an emotional state which reminded me of Hotline Miami: a confusion over whether the game is meant to be serious and comedic, and a personal introspection about whether game violence is cool, shocking, both, or neither. I say this because the narrative of My Friend Pedro is at least passingly interested in game violence, and it has more than a few jokes at the expense of players whose minds are purportedly warped by violent video games, and yet – violence is an integral part of this experience. You’ll find yourself in the shoes of an unnamed protagonist who travels through time for some reason (his best friend’s a talking banana!) and killing legions of armed goons with style.īefore talking about the game for its merits though, let’s take a detour to discuss the game’s use of violence, and how it fits in the grand scheme of things. Developed by Swedish one-man-studio DeadToast Entertainment, My Friend Pedro is a sidescrolling platformer-shooter with parkour elements, focused on kinetic movement and stringing together huge combos. It’s another in the line of skill-intensive, individual-expression-through-stylised-violence games that follows in the wake of Hotline Miami and Katana Zero. My Friend Pedro is admittedly very on brand for Devolver Digital, and it’s no surprise either that it first found life as a Flash short on Adult Swim Games.
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