It seems the Crossroads Series has settled into a groove. It’s certainly been a journey. From the selfish besieged colonists of Dead of Winter to the, uh, whatever they were in Gen7, to the lovable pirates of Forgotten Waters, these games have never sat still for long.

Freelancers, designed by Donald Shults but drawing upon Plaid Hat’s wide-ranging stable of talent, is the first time the series has felt like a repeat. Set in an Adventure Time-styled landscape that doesn’t seem to know the apocalypse has already happened, players embody a team of do-gooders who don’t seem capable of doing much good. And it’s such a riotous good time that it gets away with being a very bad game indeed.

Four freelancers walk into a river village…

Nothing sets the scene quite like the standees. Illustrated with carefree affection, they’re bright and vibrant and so delightfully scaled. Playing as the elf or the stilt-kin will see you towering over a fellow imp. In our most recent session, the troll was so bulbous that he regularly obscured our vision of the goblin, which led to us very nearly skipping his turn. It’s physical comedy worthy of a dexterity game.

Add the class descriptions and you have something that’s worthy of a laugh even during setup. These are no mere paladins, you see. Okay, there is a paladin, but that’s the exception. Most of the classes invoke honorable careers like clamdigger, private eye, or skinchanger. My most recent character was a merfolk divorcee. His primary power was being very sad and inserting unkind comments about his ex into otherwise ordinary conversations. He just wants his kids back.

And that’s before we get to the mad libs. While the game master is getting everything set up, the rest of the table is filling in details about their mercenary. Something you would collect on a hike: excellent twigs. Favorite vegetable: ketchup. A predator: Jared from Subway. Oof. Too close to the bone, Geoff.

What is the function of these elements? What do they combine to create? Tone. A sense of place. And what a place Freelancers inhabits. In the previous Crossroads title, there was a moment when the death of a comrade became a rallying cry. “Little Gertie, Little Gertie!” we chanted. That chant became an ongoing in-joke that has somehow endured for years. Freelancers brims with such moments. Where Forgotten Waters was silly and sometimes funny, Freelancers is comical in a way that appears effortless but actually requires sustained and brow-dampening exertion to craft. To play Freelancers is to laugh early and often, to draw out the quest to ensure you see every corner of the map, to eventually grow somewhat weary of the whole thing.

Mad libs.

To that end, Freelancers is also brisker than Forgotten Waters. It has learned the lesson that comedies tend to be short for a reason. It’s hard to sustain humor, and harder still to sustain wacky humor that leans so heavily on alternating sarcasm and earnestness. Those are ingredients these writers purchase by the sackful. Your freelancers are scamps and scoundrels. The world they inhabit is as dangerous as it is charming. A faded billboard advertising some long-dead ambulance chaser becomes a dire warning to stay away from necromancy; to shrug off its warnings earns your character the epithet “The Uninsured.” If these amusing anecdotes grow a little long in the tooth after two hours, at least Freelancers doesn’t require a halfway save-point the way the adventures of Forgotten Waters did.

I’ll put it this way: we haven’t laughed quite this much in a game in a long while. And that’s a very good thing, because there isn’t much puttering under Freelancers’ bonnet. Much of the game takes place on the map and in a narrated browser window. The narration, by the way, is highly recommended. That way, these portions of the game can be played with one’s eyes closed.

On occasion, you’ll open to a page in the adventure book for some light worker placement, a sequence that has you assigning your mercs to various tasks and then seeing how those tasks play out. Sometimes you’ll fail to clear a location. Not to fear — unlike its predecessor, Freelancers rarely makes you repeat these encounters until you succeed. More often than not, it assigns you a penalty and then shoves you back out into the world. This is smart design. It shaves the back end off each beat, forcing it to be clippy and impactful. Where Forgotten Waters often required you to zero out a dial before you could move on, here the objective is to keep your merry band staggering into one wackadoo scenario after another. Failure is possible but not especially likely.

The seven roles are pretty much seven bookkeepers.

Should you fail, might I recommend cheating? Nearly every character beat in Freelancers is a skill check. Dice will roll. Tokens will be expended. Loot will be assigned. But it never quite rises to the level of “making a decision.”

To be sure, there’s a certain degree of player agency. You can choose which objective to chase first, when to add a stress token to reroll a die, that sort of thing. But after designing multiple series of storybook games, it seems the crew at Plaid Hat has finally said “screw it” and decided to focus on the reason we’re here in the first place. What sets Freelancers apart isn’t its gameplay; it’s that its gameplay exists to propel the narrative forward rather than the other way around.

The result is an imperfect game that doesn’t seem to much care about said imperfections. There are seven roles to inhabit, but they’re ancillary: one person tracks injuries, another the slow progress of time, another draws lines on the map. These are further dashes of flavor, not serious considerations. The same goes for the combat and skill checks, which bluster but don’t often result in serious penalties. I haven’t played all five of the game’s scenarios, but the handful I have explored never offered much pushback. Despite the rising difficulty levels, Freelancers sticks to the script.

Ah! A noble quest!

Once again, that’s a good thing. This isn’t a hair-raiser. Nor is it interested in reinventing the wheel. It’s a way to pass a couple of hours in good company, to share a few laughs, to switch off the noggin and enjoy a well-told story. More than once, I’ve caught myself wondering why I’m having such fun with this game, with these half-realized mechanisms, over those uninteresting rolls of the dice. In those moments, I’ve pressed such thoughts to the side. Who cares? Freelancers is the dumbest of good times. But a good time it is nonetheless. This one is Little Gerties all the way down.

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A complimentary copy was provided.