Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993)

Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993), designed and written by Al Lowe and Josh Mandel, directed by Josh Mandel, developed and published by Sierra On-Line 

Comedy is a difficult thing. Or an easy thing, depending on whom you ask. I assume it is the comedians who would tell you, that making a comedy is hard while a good deal of those who just consume it would claim it a simple thing: just make jokes. The problem here in being, that jokes should be funny and what is funny depends on whom you ask. That's why those comedians you don't like still make the big bucks, as there are enough people around to find them funny no matter how much you protest against their brand of comedy.

And we haven't even touched that time can drive past comedy. Or make something older much funnier now than it ever was when it was originally made. Now, I'm no comedian, but I do think that comedy is difficult.

The introduction of Freddy Pharkas has the best part of the whole game in it, let me put that right there in the open. This part is called the Ballad of Freddy Pharkas, where the writer/designer/creator Al Lowe, better known of Leisure Suit Larry-series, sings a fantastic little banjo-led song about how Freddy lost his ear in a gunfight and became a frontier pharmacist, hiding his past from the good people of Coarsegold where he now resides. The song is well written, rather witty and just plain fun. And then the game proper begins, sadly enough.

There are troubles brewing in the small frontier town and Freddy is the man who has to solve those problems. It all begins innocently enough with Freddy doing his chores as a pharmacist, fixing up medicine for people from the recipes done by the local drunken doctor. This actually means just constantly checking your manual and fixing up medicine according to the instructions. A rather boring and tedious task.

There is one actual puzzle there to solve, as the further the day goes, the more illegible the handwriting of the doc goes, so you need to solve how to figure out the final recipe. And despite the opening feeling a rather heavy-handed copy protection scheme check,  I was still thinking, maybe there is a fun game there, somewhere, when it finally gets rolling properly.

the first malady to hit the town shredded that hope instantly. Farting horses.

Farting horses, golly, what comedy gold. See, these horses, they are farting so badly, that the whole town is about to suffocate.  Oh dear, oh dear, what will our brave pharmacist do?

Well, in this annoying segment, full of timed deaths, you need to quickly move from one place to another, look for the right items, build a gas mask, collect a fart (yes, you read that right) sample and fix up a remedy, again just copying stuff from the manual. And that's how Freddy saves the town from farting.

But oh noes, there are more troubles brewing. This time it is a stampede! But not an ordinary stampede. A stampede of snails. Yeah, it is a zany, madcap concept and it could have been break out hilarious, but the way the game handles it just doesn't work. It is a good punchline, but there is no meat on the actual joke to make it work unless you think a Lemmings joke it is tied to is somehow groundbreaking.

Let's fast forward. There's trouble with town-wide diarrhoea, evil sheriff and a greedy bank manager. Gunmen run over the town and a cardshark is fleecing up the good people at the gambling table. You know, all the usual trouble you'd expect to see in a western story, really.  But none really as abstract as a joke as the snail bit. That by itself stands out, despite it doesn't quite work.

As an adventure game Freddy Pharkas is extremely flawed. While it does play like a Sierra game from 1993, it also feels somewhat different, as it is filled with action segments, like shooting bottles, a fencing segment and even a shootout in a form of target shooting. You can, happily enough, choose a difficulty level, but the Sierra adventure engine doesn't handle these kinds of action-oriented scenes very well, which leads to many moments of frustration. And on top of that, there are scenes, where you need to quickly react to what is happening on screen if you don't want to get killed.

I don't know, maybe it was that Al Lowe and Josh Mandel were already seeing the writing on the wall in 1993 and thought, that the adventure genre needed some sprucing up in order to generate some more interest. Or perhaps they just wanted to try something different. Whatever it was, they failed at it.

The ending of Freddy Pharkas is promising more of his adventures, but as history tells us, this was the only outing this one-eared frontier pharmacist had. I am not going to call it a shame, as it just isn't a very good game, despite the Ballad of Freddy Pharkas. But you can easily check that one out from Youtube.

Freddy Pharkas is probably the biggest miss of the career of Al Lowe. It's not his only game that didn't garner the continuation that was promised in it, Torin's Passage springs to mind, but it is a game, that fails to work well either as a game or a comedy. While it has a good setting and a solid idea behind it, the writing just breaks it.

Comedy is a difficult thing. And perhaps it is even harder when attached to a game.