In Cruelty Squad, an indie game that I can only describe as terminally online Hitman, one of your targets is a character called the Chunkopop G-Tech Exec, a puerile specimen who lives in a gated community funded by seed capital and built atop an ancient mass grave. If you chat to the balding, graphic t-shirt-wearing silicon bro, he’ll ask if you’re a fellow “chunko enthusiast” who has come to check out his six-figure collection. Every wall of his office is lined with these off-brand vinyl toys, still in their packaging. “I’m absolutely nuts about these guys,” he says, presumably before you put him out of his misery.
At Gamescom earlier this year, I checked out a preview build of Funko Fusion. It’s an action-adventure game that leverages the mountain of intellectual property licensed for Funko’s ceaseless procession of plastic products — the bug-eyed characters that have somehow taken the world by storm. If you can’t already tell, I don’t understand this phenomenon. The toys follow a homogenous style that strives to render pop culture into its most recognisable and affable form. I’m sure they’ll add some nostalgic texture to the landfills of the future. But I’m afraid I will have to digest some microplastic-infused humble pie here, readers, because it is my duty to tell you that the video game adaptation, out today, is quite good.
The first and most important thing you need to know is that Funko Fusion is developed by 10:10 Games, an independent studio based in Warrington and founded by veterans of Traveller’s Tales — the crew responsible for the criminally underrated Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue, and, of course, every game with a Lego prefix that has launched in the past two decades. I didn’t know this fact before playing Funko Fusion, and now that I do, I understand the sell a little better, especially with the added input of Wil Evans, Lead Designer at 10:10 Games, who led me through my hands-on session.
“We’ve tried to create what I think is relatively close to a AAA game in the space of three years as a brand new studio with 60-70 people,” Evans explained. “And we’ve done it off the back of ‘no crunch culture’. One of the founding things is that we wanted to have a really open, chill studio.” Broadly speaking, Funko Fusion plays very similarly to TT’s Lego Star Wars games, with character-swapping for specific puzzle-solving gadgets and plenty of backtracking through levels to grab collectables afterwards.
However, it differs in the teenage edge to its tone, owing to the Universal Pictures lot of intellectual property 10:10 Games has built levels around. Colloquially, I tend to find that Funko collection is the domain of 30-year-olds or youngsters, which is why we have The Mummy and Five Nights at Freddy’s sitting side by side here. But if anything, I feel Funko Fusion is skewing towards an older demographic, with deeper generational cuts like Xena: Warrior Princess, Knight Rider and Masters of the Universe making an appearance. I guess the point is that you don’t need to like all the media franchises Funko Fusion offers. Still, if you’re partial to one or two, it is a rare opportunity to see it get a dedicated video game tie-in that would not happen otherwise. And once they’ve got you, the moreish framework of Funko Fusion’s collect-a-thon, level-based world design may hook you in for the rest of the ride.
There are seven main IPs with five sequenced levels attached – and there’s an underlying story that weaves between them all concerning the Funko company mascot’s evil twin. Beyond the five-episode levels, the other IPs are cooped up in cameo levels that you can find as secrets inside the larger play spaces. For example, Evans tells me that you unlock Five Nights at Freddy’s through Scott Pilgrim, but Scott Pilgrim also gives you access to an ‘Amp’ ability, which comes in handy in the Shaun of the Dead level – it’s all interwoven for reactive puzzling.
Some secret cameo characters must be hunted through the other IPs, too. M3GAN, from the 2022 horror movie that I have not seen, first appears in the opening level of The Thing, but you have to seek her out elsewhere to unlock her for good. Playing as Voltron involves carrying items through different worlds, Gnome Chompski style, except groups of enemies will spawn to halt your process. Oh, and Mega Man just needs to be escorted back to Rush once you find him. I was flabbergasted when Evans noted that 10:10 Games had included a level based on the Jordan Peele movie Nope. “You’ve got Jean Jacket chasing you, and you’re doing a load of puzzles to inflate the Sky Dancers to get it to come over and suck them up,” Evans said, my head spinning at the thought.
But let’s hone in on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two beloved cult comedies that have never been adapted into an interactive format. It was surprisingly fun to go through the motions of these movies in video game form, with a series of playful little easter eggs thrown in for Cornetto Trilogy superfans. During the Hot Fuzz segment, Funko Fusion gamifies the investigation process by having you put together ghostly crime scenes with a DSLR. It’s smart narrative design that stays true to the film’s narrative instead of just creating another reskinned combat playground. “The N.W.A hasn’t been revealed yet; there are no bad guys, so how do we make an interesting level where you’re playing that part of the film where he’s finding out about the murders?” Evans said. “Making the swan part of the mechanic as it leads you through the opening — it’s a reference to the film, people get it, and I think from that they know we’re going to treat it relatively well.”
As Evans spoke, I began to silence the part of my brain that was depressed about Funko Fusion being an IP concrete mixer. It’s more like an esoteric fork of Lego Star Wars… with guns. Particularly, the Hot Fuzz level convinced me that these properties could be in safe hands with 10:10 Games, a studio exceedingly comfortable with this gameplay style but also based in Northern England, where proclaiming you haven’t seen Hot Fuzz is prone to summon confused intakes of breath. Dealing with the rights holders wasn’t much trouble either, apparently. “The only one that was maybe like… and it wasn’t even tricky, it was just like ‘should we not kill the dinosaurs?’” Evans said. “And so in the Jurassic World levels, you’ll see they go to sleep rather than explode and die.”
There are no microtransactions or time-saving purchases in Funko Fusion, a game that feels custom-made for a rainy day Steam Deck session. You can unlock everything with the base in-game currency, and you’ll also be able to play it with your friends in the near future, which could be a laugh, honestly. “The only thing that probably will be sellable is DLC content, a little bit later,” Evans said. “Shortly after launch, we’re going to be activating multiplayer so that you can play four-player cooperative in the levels, and the game will scale depending on how many players are with you.”
I’ll be honest: morbid curiosity led me to demo Funko Fusion at Gamescom, and I’ve come away pleasantly surprised. The experience was promising and a much easier sell than many of the other games on my schedule. While I’m not a card-carrying Funkopathologist, I’m intrigued to check out the full game despite my established position on the plastic props. If anything, it’s a unique game totemic of our disjointed cultural milieu, a franchise Megazord with an honest heart that appeals to the cultural caveman in all of our brains.
“Before I started working on it, I never owned a Funko Pop,” Evans said. “You don’t really need to give two hoots about the physical Pops or anything like that — it’s just a game that’s wrapped up in it, and a lot of IPs that people love and enjoy and hopefully see and go, oh, I like the treatment that they gave it.”
