One of the things that I enjoy about The Secret World is that even with its dark setting, the stories and quests have good amount of humor. Last night in The Secret World, I ran a mission with @rmerrifield that had me literally laughing and smiling more than any quest in an MMO has in a very, very long time. There may be some minor spoilers here, so stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens here.

The mission was Theme Park Tycoon. You find Nicholas Winter outside of the Atlantic Island Park. It seems his father was a billionaire tycoon who left his son nothing of his fortune other than this most unfortunate amusement park. As you can imagine, it is overrun with all types of ghosts and ghouls and other such things that make you afraid of the dark.

It starts out harmless enough. Go to the Octotron. Turn it on. Then pops up the message: Survive until the ride is over. Uh oh. I won’t go into the specifics but we did survive. Next up, the Sideshow Alley. I was not so fortunate here as this little carnival game was out for vengeance. You had to figure out a way to disable it. Luckily for me, @rmerrifield was able to figure out how as I ran back to my body.

There are a few other “kill this” kind of steps in the mission. Where the tears of laughter started was at what seemed like the most harmless of things. Go to the Ferris Wheel. Examine it. Go to the next ride. Sounds easy, right? Well, let me tell you, getting off the Ferris Wheel  platform is anything other than easy. And not for the reasons you may be thinking. No, we weren’t swarmed by hordes of the undead. One single specter of a carnie popped up. And with a magic kick in the ass, he knocked us off our feet every time we got back up. I was kicked off the platform fairly early on and was able to get away. I was able to literally laugh out loud as I watched @rmerrifield get continuously knocked down, wondering how she would ever get out of the endless loop.  She eventually did, of course, laughing as hard as I was.

The final stage in the mission was in the bumper car arena. Confronted with the TSW version of the Texas Chainsaw fella, we also had to dodge and weave our way through the demon bumper cars. Let me tell you, those bumper cars packed a wallop. Here’s the TSW scarecrow guy with a nasty chainsaw chasing you about and the little Satan cars trying to knock your knees out. Perhaps you had to be there to appreciate the humor. But it was fun.

This is one of the reasons I have found myself drawn into The Secret World so thoroughly. Sure, there are the standard MMO quest templates. Go here. Find this. Kill this. But often times, the presentation is so completely different from anything I have experienced before that it just doesn’t feel like all the old MMOs. Taking a trip on a haunted roller coaster? Definitely something I have never done before. Walloped by demon bumper cars? All new to me. Anything that can make me laugh that hard? Something that I’ve been  missing for quite a while now.