Great Job, Internet: Let's review this fake The Pitt PS2 game

But just because The Pitt: The Video Game—which imagines players being forced to contend with patients, trauma, and bottled emotions on Tax Day (“A famously slow day in hospitals everywhere”)—isn’t real, doesn’t mean it can’t be expected to stand up to a little critical rigor. For instance, the visuals: Sure, the faces on the characters are suspiciously good, to the point that Noah Wyle, Isa Briones, Patrick Ball, and Supriya Ganesh are all pretty instantly recognizable. But the actual bodies and environments are blocky as hell, moving at a completely unacceptable number of frames per hour. (We know part of The Pitt‘s appeal is meant to be the way it serves as a throwback to an older model of procedural TV, but that doesn’t mean we want to see The Pitt looking like the mansion from Resident Evil, right?)

As for gameplay, the package looks like a mixed bag: The minigame where players help Dr. Robby bottle up emotions like “I’m going no helmet mode on my motorcycle” seems pretty robust, but the actual medical gameplay seems way too simplistic: A mixture of basic joint-setting controls and some outdated ironic internet racism about Italian people. We were impressed by the soundtrack, at least, which appears to be culled straight from knock-offs of Donkey Kong Country and the theme song from House, M.D. As for the Fun Factor, well, what could be more fun that spending time navigating the personal and professional crises of a fast-paced emergency room on its slowest possible day, through a series of simple dialogue prompts?

All kidding aside, it’s a pretty fun, if somewhat facile, send-up of both the show, and a particular era of gaming (even if it trades specificity for a higher rate of jokes-per-minute). If nothing else, we can’t help but wonder what the level set at the Heinz Factory Explosion looks like; if that doesn’t send Robby into Rock Bottom Mode, we don’t know what will.