The year is 666X. A powerful youngster, wise beyond his years, awakens from a B-Ball induced coma aboard the mysterious dwarf space ziggurat Necron 7, held captive by the Malevolent A.I. Cuchulainn.note With no memory of who he is or where he came from, he adopts the identity of X114JAM9 and sets off into the Post-Cyberpocalyptic Wasteland in search of the enigmatic Cyberdwarf, the only one who can reveal to him the terrible truth behind his forgotten past and make sense of his harrowing future.
After having a successful Kickstarter in 2012, the game has languished in Development Hell. A Kickstarter update in June of 2019
revealed that several important team members have left the project but promises to continue development.
In 2021, the remaining developer, Paperjack, released what was already made for the game to open source and effectively cancelled the project.
This game uses some of these tropes:
- After the End
- An Adventurer Is You
- Big Bad: Cuchulainn.
- Character Customization: The game opens up with an extremely, overly specific and very long character creation process, which involves choosing your name, birth year (in Before or After Clispaeth), Blood (Type), whatever combination of gender you are, your likes and favorites, filling out questionnaires to determine your character alignment, choosing tarot cards, doing Rorschach tests, getting offered a gumball... And none of this affects your player character.
- Continuity Nod: The protagonist of Barkley 2, who doesn't remember who he is, calls himself X114JAM9, after an error message. In the original, Vinceborg cites error X114JAM9 in association with him not remembering his purpose.
- Eldritch Abomination: Cuchulainn again.
- Genre Shift: While the original game was a turn-based RPG, Barkley 2 is a loot-based Action RPG in the vein of Diablo and Borderlands.
- Living Weapon: Guns are living creatures that you craft via a breeding system as well as fishing for them in the wild.
- Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo/Colon Cancer: Invoked; "The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa".
- Old Save Bonus: A save import from Barkley 1 was the $62,000 stretch goal in the Kickstarter.
- Shout-Out: In the demo, if you repeatedly die a couple of times, you get sent to a completely different area, to what is basically Dark Souls' Firelink Shrine, complete with the obligatory crestfallen warrior.
- Year X: Year 666X
