If I had a penny for every point’n’click game this year that revolved around people going backwards in time and the consequences thereof, I’d have two pennies. While Old Skies was a moody look at the regrets of our past lives, The Drifter is more like sinking into a freezing cold bath, in the knowledge that things are going to get worse before they get better. It’s a horror game, is me point. One that thoroughly enjoys smacking about its central protagonist.
Not that it doesn’t touch on deep themes. Much like Old Skies (and I promise this is the last time I compare the two), regret is a major theme. After all, I suspect the whole concept of time travel was born from the desire to fix or erase past mistakes, or plaster over old heartbreak. It’s fertile ground for a horror game. The Drifter sprinkles it with an excellent protagonist and serviceable, occasionally exciting, gameplay.
Boxcar Mishaps
If you just glance at the pretty, animated pixel art and point’n’click trappings of The Drifter, you might think you’re in for an experience like the old Sierra adventure games. Well, until you look at the above screenshot anyway. The Drifter opens with our protagonist, Mick Carter, waking up on a boxcar, having returned home for his mum’s funeral. Already, a gloomy start. Then, when he wakes up another drifter to try and escape the car, a bunch of goons in tactical gear shoot his companion dead. He stumbles his way into the sewers, but a chain of events ensue that result in him getting chucked into the reservoir and left for dead.
Then something strange happens. He drowns, but at the moment of death, he’s brought back to life with a jolt – right at the moment he’s dropped into the water. That’s the time travel bit. From there, Mick is framed for the death of another drifter and goes on the run, while trying figure out what’s given him this power, and why it’s turning his brain to scrambled egg. The Drifter has a great story, full of a sense of creeping dread in the first half, where Mick begins to question what’s real and what isn’t.
It does risk getting a bit up itself in the latter half, though. There’s rather a sudden shift of tone, where we go from being locked up by a serial killer to bumbling around a futuristic lab. The ending does bring things back, though, and it works because it’s anchored to Mick. It’s a testament to both the writing, and the excellent voice acting on display. Mick isn’t just a passive observer. He has his own past demons, which he ran from, and his own beliefs. He also isn’t shy at telling people to piss off if needs be. Critically, while he can be funny, he doesn’t just spew glib remarks. He feels like a real person, in a distinctly unreal situation.
Rewind’n’Click
Mick’s also fantastic at cobbling together complex solutions from random assorted junk, making him the perfect protagonist for a point’n’click. The Drifter follows the basic setup for such a thing. You have a problem you need to solve. Say, you need a map of a graveyard. So you pick up every piece of junk around to try and solve it. Like lobbing a brick through a window so the alarm goes off and you can steal a glance at the code, then unlocking the door with an umbrella. You know, normal things that people do every day.
To be fair though, The Drifter is more grounded than most. It deliberately gets away from the ‘moon logic’ of others in the genre. This is a double edged sword though. There are no rubber chickens with pullies, which is good. You can intuit most solutions from what’s scattered around. The flip side is that a lot of standard puzzles feel like busywork. At one point, we boot up a PC to find the hard-drive has been taken. We then visit a stranded car, which has the requisite HDD in its glovebox. The story can handwave it away, but it’s awfully convenient.
A few too many puzzles don’t require brainpower, just mooching from place to place. But, in key sections, The Drifter does something I thought impossible. It makes point’n’click games exciting. There are moments when you’re solving puzzles against the threat of sudden death. Like the reservoir bit, where you have limited time to figure things out as Mick frantically narrates his own impending doom. The time rewinds do take the sting out, but the panicked music and Mick’s frantic monologues go a long way. The solutions are never amazingly complex, but the sense of immediate urgency jams my brain up. I start trying silly things. It’s a great trick.
The Drifter – Wonderfully Loopy Writing
I keep coming back to the writing. It’s easy for a game about time travel to get a bit self-absorbed. The Drifter gets close. The back-half of the game descends into chats about the science of time travel, and paints away the horror in the first half as hallucinations. It’s saved by two things. Firstly, a great ending that brings all that horror back in. Secondly, the characters are all well written. Mick’s ex-wife, Sarah, for instance, is great. Furious at Mick for leaving, but human enough to know that now is not the time to twist the knife.
The Drifter‘s plot only works because the individual pieces are high quality and all fit together well. The voice acting is stellar, the writing handles the loopy subject matter well ,and the gameplay manages to be nice and exciting. Even the pixel art is fantastic. Though if you’ve read my reviews before, you know that’s my weak spot. Realistically, the only issue with The Drifter is that paring down the point’n’click madness exposes the holes in the genre. A minute issue. If you can ignore that, you’re left with an interesting and exciting adventure game, that enjoys dropping ice cubes down the back of your neck.
