Itâs odd how rare it is to hear an Australian accent in a video game. In point-and-click adventure The Drifter, however, youâll hear a lot of them, along with some superb Aussie vernacular. The Drifter is a lengthy tale of an itinerant man who, on discovering he cannot die, becomes entangled in a conspiracy of monsters, murder, and reluctant family.
Mick Carter has mostly given up. Since the death of his son, heâs walked out on his wife and chosen to live a drifterâs life. However, his motherâs just died and his sister has insisted he come back home for her funeral. So, riding a boxcar, he arrives back in town, where heâs immediately confronted by armed men who shoot and kill a fellow traveler. Scrambling to escape, Mick finds himself in an abandoned tunnel by a canal, and must immediately solve some point-n-click puzzles to surviveâfix a car engine with some hose, find some fuel, that kind of thing, alongside talking to an old homeless friend as well as a cub reporter from a local paper.
Except, itâs a bluff. Itâs a fascinating move by developers Powerhoof, who have previously given us multiplayer dungeon crawler Crawl and bonkers party game Regular Human Basketballâtwo games utterly unlike each other and unlike this latest. Because Mick Carter isnât going to fix the car, on account of being murdered.
He wakes upâis that the right term?âunderwater, his feet tied to a rope coming up from the bottom of the canal, and if you donât act fast, he drowns. And then wakes up (?) again, in the situation. Each death is agony, utter trauma, and in the white expanse that interrupts his moments of being alive is only more pain. Things have taken an odd turn.
Once you escape this, Mick still has to attend a funeral, with family relying on him to not let them down this one time, but clearly things are somewhat fraught. And so properly begins the nine-chapter story of his attempt to uncover the conspiracy that has brought him to this place, with help from his sister, wife, and various oddballs he encounters on the way. Oh, and now his dead son is showing up and giving him advice, and thereâs no way of knowing just how much Mick is losing his mind.
This excellent opening, and indeed fantastic extended middle, is superb. Self-described as âpulp,â the story is deliberately outlandish, but grounded by Mickâs down-to-earth working class Aussie attitude. The acting by the entire cast is fantastic, and itâs quite something when you learn, as the credits roll, that so many of those distinctive characters were voiced by the same people. Mick is voiced by Adrian Vaughan (more usually an art lead on games like Civ VII), who I had no idea was also behind another six characters, some of them major roles. Rhiannon Moushall (Old Skies, Dragon Quest III: HD-2D) also puts in a triple-shift, and a special shout-out goes to Shogo Miyakita (Rise of the RĆnin, Space Marine II) for his fantastic performance as D.I. Hara, one of the most interesting characters in the game.
The pixel art is also absolutely stellar. Powerhoofâs pixel chops are the one consistent theme through their disparate games, and completely stunning here. Every scene is beautifully painted in a way reminiscent of classic LucasArts, and the character animations are bespoke and meticulous. The game always looks incredible, even when itâs taking place in an abandoned sewer tunnel.
So yes, there are so many good things to say about this game. You may have spotted, however, that I praised its opening and middle, but left out its ending. Thatâs not quite as damning as it might suggest, but it does speak of my incredulity as the plot progressed. Obviously Iâm not going to give any spoilers (Iâve deliberately avoided telling you key themes of the game because theyâre not revealed until the middle act), but it all gets so incredibly silly that it did rather lose its gravitas. At a certain point, so many double-bluffs had occurred that I stopped believing in anything it was saying, which naturally detached me from feeling invested.
As is so often the case, the game was at its best when it kept things low-key. I was having the best time when I was breaking into newspaper offices, or making plans with the ragtag group of estranged family. As The Drifter reaches its grand finale, things became not so much pulp as pulped. You can see the obvious influences from John Carpenter, but things end up losing grip of that b-movie vibe and just become a bit chaotic. Itâs not a disaster! Itâs a damn site better than the end of many a game. Itâs just that it doesnât deliver on the promises made by the quality of the bulk of the game.
I think this causes the gameâs biggest issue: what is it about? Reflecting on that question, Iâm stumped. Clearly itâs largely about death, but then so is life, so that doesnât narrow things down. It doesnât even really get into the consequences of a life in which you cannot die. Itâs about transience, I suppose, both in terms of an approach to life, and life itself, but this theme is left under-explored or undermined. In the end, itâs aboutâŠa series of events happening in order. Fun events! An enjoyable time. But one thatâs left me feeling unsatiated.
I did hit a couple of odd moments where I needed a hint to move on. Fortunately, thereâs a superb spoiler-free hint system made by the developers, via an Itch page. It lets you pick a chapter, and then asks you questions about where you are, prompting you down a chain of links thatâll lead you to a hint. This is a very neat solution, but I think perhaps made me a little too forgiving of one particular section in which Mick is chained to a radiator, and the âcorrectâ sequence of convoluted actions you need to perform in order to escape make next to no sense.
I still absolutely recommend it. Itâs intriguingly packaged, the game strictly divided into its chapters rather than sprawling outward. In many point-n-clicks, youâre left revisiting a dozen empty locations when trying to find the live section of the story, but here each section is walled off, restricted to a specific portion of town,or a certain location. Sometimes this felt overly restrictive, but most often it felt safely contained, focused.
I wanted The Drifter to be 2025âs Norco, and itâs not that. But that was an unreasonable expectation. Instead itâs just as it promotes itself: a pulp thriller with a unique story, stunning art, and some fantastic acting. Go in with that expectation and itâll deliver in spadesâif perhaps a few too many by the end.
The Drifter is out now on Steam, currently around $14.
