Her Majesty's Spiffing: The Empire Staggers Back is an Adventure Game by Billy Goat Entertainment Ltd.
After the United Kingdom withdrew from the Union, the Queen decided to invoke the royal prerogative to dissolve parliament and take control of the country herself. However, rather than deal with all the messy armed conflict that comes with conquering other countries in the name of her own, the Queen instead went with a different approach: she's going to expand the British Empire to other planets.
Thus we join our heroes: Captain Frank Lee English and his subordinate Aled Jones. These two have been tasked with exploring the galaxy and finding hospitable worlds to claim in the name of queen and country. The game follows them and all the wacky antics they get up to in their mission.
The game was funded on Kickstarter on November 21st, 2014. It was released on December the 7th, 2016.
It can be bought on Steam
, Xbox, Switch and Playstation.
Her Majesty's Spiffing contains examples of:
- Apes in Space: One member of the French space team, Pierre, is a gorilla in a spacesuit.
- Autosave: The game autosaves at certain points. You know it's doing so if you see an hourglass icon in the top right corner of the screen.
- Bloody Handprint: Two are on the map in the ship's lower level.
- British Royal Guards: In the game's intro cutscene, we see the Queen walking through Buckingham Palace, which is, of course, full of them.
- Brits Love Tea: The first actions in the game are to guide Frank Lee English to the kitchen to get himself (and Aled if you make him ask for it) a cup of tea.
- Cartoon Cheese: Zigzagged. When English collects the cheese in the kitchen, it's a plain wedge. However, he can present it to the French space team as a peace offering, only for them to shoot three holes in it.
- P.O.V. Cam: When Frank Lee English takes over piloting the ship after getting himself and Aled Jones tea, the game's perspective changes to his.
- Punny Name: Get it? Frank Lee English, frankly English?
- Save Point: Even though you can save from the pause menu, a typewriter in the ship's lab can serve this purpose in the game.
- Shout-Out:
- When commenting on Aled Jones, Frank can call Jones the Lewis to his Morse, the Gromit to his Wallace, and the Andrew Ridgeley to his George Michael.
- In the ship's laboratory, there's a typewriter at which that Captain can save game data. If he examines it, he notes that someone was writing a lot about STARS.
- When English and Jones reach the planet, one thing you see when climbing down into the trench is the Statue Of Liberty.
- When the French space team have English and Jones at gunpoint, you can make English shout "By the power of Grayskull!".
- The ship's autopilot is an inflatable EDI.
