Let's go, Georgio!
Roundabout is a top down driving puzzle game... with a twist.Roundabout follows the story of Georgio Manos, the world's first revolving limousine driver. Georgio must learn to navigate the perils of the luxury transport industry while driving a car that literally cannot stop spinning, including picking up passengers, making deliveries, nefarious French Canadians, and falling in love. All the cutscenes are all done as 70's B-movie style Live Action Cutscenes, consisting entirely of shots of Georgio in the front seat and separate shots of the passengers in the back.
This Work Provides Examples Of:
- Ambiguous Gender: Done in a particularly ludicrous manner. Georgio is played by a woman, Kate Welch, but the game entirely avoid pronouns or other indicators of gender when referring to the character, with other characters and the narrator using either Georgio's name (even when a pronoun would have sounded more natural) or using epithets like "kid".
- Amphibious Automobile: An upgrade allows you to float the limousine in water and drive as normal and even make short dives underwater. Touching water without it equipped is instant death, however.
- Bizarre Puzzle Game: On the surface, it looks a like a top down driving game, but it's more of a puzzle game of trying to fit your bizarrely-moving limo through increasingly complex obstacle courses.
- Bottle Episode: The cutscenes are all shots of either Georgio in the front seat of the limo or a shot of the passenger in the backseat, all using the same static camera angles and with an obvious green-screen stock-footage background where appropriate. The only exceptions come from shots consisting entirely of Stock Footage and a few missions that have characters standing in front of the same obvious green-screen.
- Camp: This game relies heavily on camp for its aesthetic and humor. The whole game is made out to be a cheap, low budget 1970s thing... made in 2014.
- Collision Damage: Touching virtually anything taller than the limo will inflict a point of damage.
- Comedic Sociopathy: The player is not only actively encouraged by the game to run over pedestrians for rewards, but even In-Universe a lot of the passenger's quick solutions to problems is to run everyone in their way over (which Georgio obliges without question).
- Cosmetic Award: There are a large number of unlockable paint jobs, hats, and horns with no in-game effects.
- Cool Car: Georgio is driving a limousine that is constantly spinning in place and can make six foot vertical jumps. With the correct upgrades, it can also float in water, shoot traffic cones out the back, and shrink down to half its size.
- Critical Existence Failure: If the limo is down to its last point of health, a light bump into anything will make it explode.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: There's no penalty for death, besides a second to respawn and getting sent back to your last checkpoint, and checkpoints are extremely frequent during missions, never setting you back more than a few seconds. Overworld checkpoints can be a bit more spread out, but you're still never very far from where you died.
- Dem Bones: Jeffrey the Skeleton.
- Drives Like Crazy: For starters, you're driving a spinning limo through the busy streets of Roundabout. Even beyond that, however, Georgio is encouraged to drive over pedestrians, disregard stop lights and lane markers, and go off-road.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Or rather, every limousine. Dying to anything, whether you've crashed into one too many cars or fallen off a cliff into the sea, results in your limo exploding in a fiery ball. This happens to Ronaldo's limo when you run him off the road as well.
- Excuse Plot: You take on the role of Georgio, a spinning limo driver that picks up and drops off various wacky people while developing a love interest with Beth.
- French Jerk: Ronaldo is The Rival to Georgio, and isn't very nice to boot, at least until he is killed in a car accident.
- Heroic Mime: Georgio, who never speaks and only communicates through nonverbal facial expressions and some hand gestures, which everyone can understand without trouble. The narrator lampshades this.
- Interface Screw:
- The mission where you have to kill the triathlon competition has the screen washed in groovy colors due Georgio taking some drugs. The same effect pops up if you use the slow-motion power up.
- The final mission has you driving straight instead of spinning. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds since acceleration, reverse, and steering are all done on the analog stick/directional buttons and you can no longer make the limo jump.
- Level-Map Display: There is a full map of each area, stylized like a city street-map, that is displayed whenever you pause the game.
- Live-Action Cutscene: Roundabout's cutscenes are live-action clips specifically made to look like a 70s B-movie.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Averted for the police cars. While the cops don't spin, they are subjected to the same 4 HP rule as you and will blow up if they crash into anything 4 times. They'll also instantly blow up if they crash into the water like you do without one specific upgrade.
- No Budget: The game was made by a team of only two people on an obviously small budget. They even note in the ads for the game that the skeleton character in the game is a $40 skeleton they bought off Amazon.com. All of the characters have very low-budget costumes and the footage in the game is both obviously green-screened and shot in a cheap, old car (which was, in fact, a retired police cruiser and not a limousine). Audio from characters that didn't appear on screen was mostly provided by members of the Something Awful Forums Let's Play community (of which the two devs, DeliciousBees and Panzer Skank, were members). The whole feel of the 1970s cutscenes (and the acting in the game) is that it is a very low-budget affair, and the game clearly is aware of how low budget it is and doesn't take itself too seriously.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Mickey once dons a pair of those stock glasses with the bushy eyebrows and oversized nose in an attempt to hide his presence from Georgio. The most Georgio can muster as a response is an amused nod as they go to collect "Not-Mickey's" important business things. Likewise, the Canadian tourist looks an awful lot like the Swedish tourist from an earlier mission and Georgio isn't buying it.
- Post-Processing Video Effects: The whole game has a grainy, 70's video style film overlay which can be disabled in the options.
- Silent Protagonist: Georgio never speaks and is even specifically pointed out by the narrator to be talented at "communicating silently".
- Silent Snarker: Georgio uses eyerolls and other sorts of look that conveys the snark.
- Soccer-Hating Americans: The baseball coach complains that he's being forced by the school to coach soccer too, and whines that "apparently this isn't America anymore" before insinuating that Georgio must have some affinity for the sport based on the ambiguous European-ness of the name.
- Stock Footage: Any scenes that are not interior shots of the limo consist entirely of obviously spliced together cheap stock footage.
- The '70s: This game is set in the 1970s, and makes it very obvious, with references to Jimmy Carter and Disco.
- The Voiceless: Georgio never speaks, but the passengers are somehow able to know exactly what Georgio is thinking.
