Clowning Around: Dropsy Dropping By In September

"OMG" cried our John, showing a new trailer for Dropsy [official site] around the RPS treehouse. For those of you not fluent in middle-aged dad, I'll translate. I believe he was trying to say "This upcoming adventure game looks funny and trippy and a bit gross and I really dig it but I'm a bit afraid of clowns and don't want to look at Dropsy's maw any longer and I don't like writing news posts, so if someone does like writing news and isn't afraid of baggy trousers would like to...?"

Hi there.

Isn't that delightful? And also a bit horrible? But in a way you like?

The setup: poor Dropsy finds himself cast out and no longer a clown after a tragic fire at his family circus. Still, on he goes, making friends and trying to find out what happened. It's a point and clicker with a few novel twists. It's open-world, for starters, not forcing players down a set path. Dropsy only communicates with people in visual symbols too, so you have to guess quite what they're trying to say. Along with solving puzzles, he'll be hugging people - he is a friendly clown. But oh when he sleeps, when he sleeps he enters a nightmare world that, for five minutes, lets him explore a tormenting hellscape built from fragments of what's happened. Poor Dropsy.

Dropsy is coming to Windows, Mac, and Linux on September 10th. It's made by Jay Tholen and A Jolly Corpse, published by Devolver Digital. The game's been a long time coming, from an initial Kickstarter to buy software in 2011, through a failed follow-up in 2013 when it turned out that software alone isn't enough to make a game, before a third later in 2013 hit the goal and drew Devolver's attention.