It’s been a minute since I’ve gone back to my roots of point and click, pixel art adventure games. Back in my early years of reviews when the 1 per week burden was too hard to meet with my usual diet of high grade games. Point and click games were a great fallback as that titles in that genre could be ploughed through in a day or two over the weekend. Heck I was (and still am, although I hesitate to ask for keys these days) even on the list of reviewers for Wadjet Eye’s games showing just how core they used to be to my reviewer experience. But since NORCO nothing in the genre has really caught my eye, that was until I saw The Drifter which comes from newly established Australian developer Powerhoof. Suffice to say the trailer did enough to entice me without revealing too much; a rarity in today’s world of over-selling everything.
Mick’s been away for a while, living it rough around various places in Australia not out of necessity but out of choice. His itinerant life hasn’t exactly been hard for him but he did leave a rather large hole in the place that he left behind. It seems that there was nothing that could bring him back, save for the day when he received a fateful phone call: his mum had passed away. Figuring he could do his duties and then make off again Mick jumped a train back home, still dreading coming back home. What Mick didn’t expect was to find himself in the middle of a gunfight when he tried to hop off the train and that was only the beginnings of his troubles.
The Drifter takes inspiration from the adventure games of yesteryear with the visual language feeling very similar to many of LucasArts’ titles. The usual modern improvements are seen here as well including the use of modern lighting techniques, higher frame rate animations and a wider (although still muted) colour palette. The results speak for themselves with the detailed environments being brought to life in ways that never would have been possible back in the early days of pixel art adventure games. The only criticism I’ll level at it is that interactive elements can sometimes be hard to discern without passing your cursor over everything in view. I know, this is a signature trope of the genre, but it leads to one of my core critiques of how many games in this genre are constructed.
A point and click adventure is what’s promised and is what you’ll get when you sit down to play The Drifter. All the usual tropes apply: you’ll have access to a number of areas, items and NPCs of which you need to figure out which combination of what will lead you onto the next part of the story. Your inventory is limited and all items that you pick up will have some sort of function in a puzzle, so no need to worry about overfilling your pockets with items that have no use. The devs have also done a good job of recognising potential alternate solutions and recording voice lines as to why they won’t work, instead of just giving a generic “I can’t/won’t do that” kind of response. Every so often you’ll be put through a more action oriented version of the loop, something that definitely helps to ratchet up the tension in an otherwise steady-paced adventure game.
For adventure game veterans most of the game’s puzzles are going to make sense right off the bat with logical solutions being somewhat easy to discern. The game’s early levels are also confined enough that you won’t be searching far and wide for that one thing in order unlock the next puzzle, helping you to get a feel for the kinds of puzzles that you’ll be facing later on. There are also minor in-game hints strewn about the place to help you out should you find yourself stuck at any one particular point, which is nice, although it’s the places where those aren’t which caught me out the most.
To that end most of the puzzles where I found myself blocked usually came down to me not realising that I could interact with something. This is where the pixel art visual style tends to let me down as I simply did not clock that there were items that I could interact with. The best example I can think of in The Drifter is in one scene where there’s a coat lying over a fence railing that you can find something in. I could not for the life of me see it, given it was a stretch of maybe a handful of pixels wide and a very similar colour to the surroundings. Other games mitigate this by giving you some indication of objects you can interact with but The Drifter doesn’t which certainly made some of the game’s sections far more challenging than they really should’ve been.
The narrative is deep and engaging, made all the better by being fully voiced acted by fellow Aussies and Kiwis. For the most part it’s also well paced, although there’s a certain point (I’ve since learned that this would likely be called the midpoint in the three act structure, look I can learn!) where the wind kind of falls out of the sails before the game pushes towards the end. To be sure, it picks up after that point but I always find it weird to keep playing once it feels like the major resolution that you’ve been building up to occurs. I had the same issue with Clair Obscur in fact, the feeling not abating until many hours afterwards.
The Drifter shows that the adventure game genre still has a lot to give even decades later. The pixel art visuals are top notch, showing that you can stay true to the visual languages of yore whilst still giving them a modern flair. The puzzle mechanics are well thought out for the most part, only being let down by the unfortunately typical visual confusion that can result from this art style. The narrative is solid, even if I felt like the game’s closing moments felt a little odd due to the penultimate conclusion leaving me reeling whilst the game wanted me to carry on. Powerhoof certainly look like one in the many Aussie developers I need to keep my eye on going forwards!
Rating: 8.0/10
The Drifter is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $29.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 7.7 hours playtime and 72% of the achievements unlocked.
