Game 18 of 2024: Darkside Detective

 Darkside Detective

Developer: Spooky Doorway
Publisher: Akupara Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Point and Click, Adventure

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: 5

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Darkside Detective is a rather small adventure game filled with separate bite-sized cases to solve.

See? Cases.

You play as detective Francis McQueen, lead investigator of the Darkside Division. McQueen and his partner, Officer Dooley, take on the supernatural cases of Twin Lakes City, including gremlins, lake monsters, and poltergeists.

And toilet ghosts.

Darkside Detective plays like most point and click adventure games, but perhaps even simpler. Your inventory never grows too big and I didn't find any puzzles particularly difficult. It's a charming enough game that provides a chuckle here and there, and the low-res pixel art is particularly nice. 

I'd play that game

If you feel like playing something spooky (without actually being spooky) this time of year while waiting to hand out candy to the neighborhood kids, Darkside Detective might just scratch that itch.

Game 15 of 2024 - The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

Developer: Cloak and Dagger Games
Publisher: Wadjet Eye Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure, Horror

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: 6

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.6/10

Check out this fuckin' guy.

Give us a kiss love, eh?

That's Arthur. He's a bit of a dipshit. We first meet him as he stumbles, drunk, out of The Plough and Furrow, and accosts our heroine for a kiss. Despite this borderline sexual assault, Arthur actually becomes one of your closest allies in your quest.

Thomasina Bateman arrives in the fictional town of Bewlay to excavate Hob's Barrow. She's an antiquarian like her father, who lies comatose after a mysterious accident years before.

I'm a sucker for this art style.

Players will notice immediately that this bucolic little hamlet has sinister undercurrents. Thomasina, a highly educated and rational individual, soon has the limits of her rationality tested as the tale unfolds, transforming from a historical adventure into a folk horror tale with it's origins in the Bronze Age.

Sweet, sweet, rest.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow plays like a pretty standard point-and-click adventure games. The puzzles all make sense for the most part, and there aren't any irritating pixel hunts like in lesser games. What really elevates it is the story and the performance of the voice actors. There were times I felt like I was taking part in a period drama rather than playing a game. I'm a big fan of the genre, and this is probably one of the best examples in recent memory.

Kudos.

Game 11 of 2023: Chicken Police: Paint it RED (2020)

Chicken Police: Paint it RED

Developer: The Wild Gentlemen
Publisher: Sega
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure, Visual Novel

Difficulty: Easy
Date Started: Apr 14 2023
Date Ended: Apr 15 2023
Hours: ~6

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.5/10

Chicken Police! Police that are chickens! It's the famous Chicken Police!

In Chicken Police: Paint it RED, you play as Sonny Featherland, an aging cop (that's also a rooster) only a few months from retirement. In the tradition of hardboiled detective stories, Sonny is doing his best Phillip Marlowe/Humphrey Bogart impression, speaking in the patois unique to the prohibition era underworld.

Chicken Police: Paint it RED feels straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, which is obviously the intent. Full of the tropes and bon mots of old pulp novels, Chicken Police mostly plays it straight. Sure, there's plenty of humor and clever (and not so clever) references and eye-winks, but this is more homage than satire. And you know what?

It works. It really does, and I liked it a lot.

You though I was kidding when I said he was a chicken but I wasn't, though. I wasn't.

The setting is, quite frankly, fantastic. The story takes place in Clawville, a city inhabited by a diverse spread of anthropomorphic animals. Clawville is something of a grand social experiment where predators and prey live in (relative) piece. Humans apparently existed in the distant past, but are now relegated to myths and legends. Andromorphic insects live in the Hive, a ghetto where even cops dare not enter. Insects are subject to extreme racism and poverty, and are depicted as having to take desperate measures in order to survive including and not limited to selling their larva to food manufacturers for cash. Jesus, that's dark. Everything is rendered in shadowy black and white, except for a splash of color here and there.

Multi-species harmony doesn't come without a price, though. Clawville has a figurehead king, but is actually ruled by the Council of Twelve, most of whom are in the pockets of murine mega-gangster Hobart "Ibn" Wessler.

Sorry, he's just too cute to be afraid of.

Sonny and his partner Marty are up against a corrupt system, attempting to figure out who is threatening Natasha Catzenko, nightclub owner and the girlfriend of Ibn Wessler. The gameplay is mostly point and click adventure, with some minigames and visual novel elements. Most of the time, you're traveling around the city questioning people, adding clues to your cluebook. Occasionally you get to interrogate a suspect, and your questions determine how much of the story you actually learn. Sonny gives you clues as to the suspects personality, and you have to choose your questions carefully. This is mostly straightforward, but I found a few instances where Sonny would be like "Yeah, now's the time to go in HARD!" followed by a bunch of softball questions.

I found the minigames to pretty weak to be honest, and the game would be better without them. You get into a shootout/car chase twice during the game, and I kept failing until I finally realized I wasn't supposed to shoot the bad guys, just their car. There's a minigame where you zip up an escort's dress, and it's just sort of... pointless. It's not hard, it doesn't accomplish anything, and you don't have to do it.

Like, why would I do that? Why would I NOT shoot the bad guys, with machine guns, that are trying to shoot me? Wouldn't that be easier?

Natasha Catzenko also gets a musical number that I found embarrassing. Like, the song was so bad I cringed(but well produced, the whole game is well produced actually).

tl;dr: Great game for adventure fans. Really liked it and hope there's more Chicken Police adventures to come.