I’ve played a lot of different point and click adventure games over the years, and while I’ve certainly played some that are rife with tension and thrills, I’d never had one that has felt like I’m playing a cinematic thriller, not until The Drifter.
Powerhoof are no strangers to Adventure games, although you might have been fooled from reading our archives, where we’ve covered some of their other games including The Not Very Golden Age of Piracy, Morse C.O.D. and Regular Human Basketball. The Drifter is their first large-scale project within the adventure genre, and if they can keep the quality of pacing and atmosphere from here then it’s definitely not going to be their last.
The Drifter puts you in the shoes of Mick Carter, a grizzled drifter who discovers he has the ability to reverse time as a result of his own murder. He sets off to unravel his own murder, and find out why other homeless people have been disappearing and growing crazy, only to wound up tied up in a dark, conspiracy that seems to pursue him at every step.
Everything here works together fantastically, from the moody thriller story and the dark shadows and blood and fire reds with the pixel art through to the fantastic Australian setting and the brilliant voice-work that comes with it. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a point and click adventure game and wanted to write that the pacing was fantastic, and that’s largely because pacing is only really a thing in the later, more cinematic entries such as later Telltale Games and Life is Strange… but, the pacing here is fantastic. The quieter moments had a constant, ebbing tension, and the action moments genuinely got my heart racing long after I learned that dead doesn’t mean dead here.
In many ways Mick feels like a luckless underdog, with his grunts and cussing making him feel all the more human and relatable; A non-heroic character thrust into a situation entirely out of their depth. He regularly jumps to logical conclusions that are perhaps so obvious and situational that the narrative path doesn’t feel like one big trope – he reacts to the events around, and never really manages to take charge until right at the end, instead being batted around by the twists and turns of the story.
Not that point and click adventure games lean towards immature stories, but The Drifter certainly plays a little darker than most. Sure, death is a regular theme in The Blackwell series and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is as far from an emotional cakewalk as you can get, but The Drifter mixes danger, bloody death and abandonment (as well as the grief that comes with it) into a tight narrative.
Ultimately, though The Drifter is probably the best adventure game that I’ve played over the past few years, and it almost feels ready to welcome people back to the genre, although it would need some changes. For a start, some objects require the same actions performed on them multiple times, which is quite uncommon in the genre – this takes a little bit of unlearning to get used to. Similarly, as I said earlier, everything feels incredibly logical and sequential, but this means that when things are a little bit leftfield it can sometimes completely stump you, similarly, even though you keep restarting after death, there sometimes isn’t much time to tinker with the problem. A help system, even if it was just hints or a reiteration of what actions lead to this point, would help returning players and players who are returning to the genre after a few years outside of it.
The Drifter is available now for PC and Nintendo Switch.
