🔞 ADULT: App/ - Complete Album!

So, in this game you play as Mick Carter, a drifter, who has clearly had better weeks. No job. No plan. No clean clothes. Basically, you'll be playing a man whose life fits neatly into a single grocery bag.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3630499900

You wake up on a train like your life derailed somewhere between yesterday and now. Possibly earlier. Immediately you'll notice that Mick narrates everything like he is stuck inside his own gritty novel. He does not just open a door. He'll narrate "I give the door a push. It does not move. Figures." It feels like he is always roleplaying his own life, even when nothing impressive is happening, and I love it. The voice acting is awesome and carries a huge part of the experience. Every line sounds natural, I actually felt like the actors understand who these people are instead of just reading words off a screen. Micks delivery is especially strong. Shoutout to Mick ~Wooooo! His dry tone and tired sarcasm made him a very enjoyable character to play.

From the start the 'drifter' vibe makes you feel like someone who fell out of the world and landed back in it sideways. The game leans into that feeling of being unwanted and out of place and it works. You are not a hero. You are just a hobo trying to survive the trouble that found him. But slowly the story slips into something stranger. At first you're just someone who's at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then slowly you'll start realizing this is not just a rough story about a guy at the bottom.

The mystery turns Lovecraftian and unsettling in a really good way. Not with jump scares. It eases you into it until you suddenly notice you are deeply hooked into what is going on. What really surprised me is how the ending landed emotionally for me. After all the tension, the paranoia and strange horror... the game quietly turns toward L♡VE (Not in a cheesy way). Both sides of the story are driven by it. The hero. The villain. Different paths, same problem. It becomes the reason things started and the reason they end. It reframes everything that came before without spelling it out. In a way, even for the villain, it's touching.

You've probably already noticed the pixel art. I can only say, yes yes yeees! The pixel art looks fantastic from start to finish. Every location feels deliberate and the artists know exactly how to use light and color to set a tone. Though, there are quite a few moments where the game fades to black to narrate what happens instead of animating it. Most of the time this works well. It keeps the pacing tight and lets your imagination fill in the gaps. In a few key scenes though, I found myself wishing the game stayed on screen a little longer. Seeing some moments play out would have hit harder I think.

Steam Deck: Perfect for the Steam Deck! The controls feel fully designed for a controller instead of those games that are awkwardly mapped after the fact. For a lack of better words, there is a.. uh... radial targeting system? Just take it from me, they have implemented an especially smart way to handle point-and-click-ing with a controller and makes interacting with the world feel fast and natural.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3630500982

♡ Highly recommended ♡. If you like story driven games with sharp writing and incredible voice-acting, you will most likely enjoy this one. I hope to see more from this team!!

It's about the journey, not the destination, I suppose. The Drifter's hooks are strong enough to carry an initially engrossing story that tackles pulpy depictions of sci-fi and horror tropes, marrying them with the underexplored and sympathetic perspective of a homeless man. There's notches of commentary on the material reality of poverty and our shared misunderstanding of it, as well as broader themes of responsibility and grief. The tension is palpable, the danger feels real even in a time-loop story, the main character's voice acting is top-notch. He needs more work. And while it does nothing to shake up the point-and-click formula, the first half's puzzles are intuitive enough to naturally grasp without too much pixel hunting.

Unfortunately, things start curdling in the second half on all fronts. The puzzles lean more into trial and error, blunt experimentation over natural intuition. The story climaxes into a small mess of sci-fi cliches with a couple of neat inversions of the time travel formula, but does nothing to plug the natural plot holes that brings. The tone flattens out into something altogether more generic, not helped by side characters far less engrossing than Mick Carter himself. Either the detective is voiced by ManlyBadassHero or he's doing an impression. Either way, he clashes hard with the Australiana of the rest of the cast. And while the narration is incredible, I can't help but feel like it covers for the inability, or expense, in animating way too many incidental interactions, where the screen just cuts to black instead, killing the atmosphere. Shame as the pixel art look works well.

It was a long wait from the demo to the full release, and while it was worth it for Mick's endless top-end voice acting, the story ultimately left me cold for how much promise it had. Barely ekes out a recommendation for adventure fans, but you couldn't say it was much less cheesy than The Dig or less ridiculous than Day Of The Tentacle, which was on purpose.

The Drifter is a point and click adventure game about a drifter who returns home after years away to attend his mother's funeral, and immediately gets entangled in a sci-fi conspiracy and manhunt. It's a good time and has great production values - lovely pixel art, the voice actors all do a great job (especially the lead, who both has dialogue and narrates), the music's nice. The puzzles are all pretty sensible and I only got stuck once or twice when a sequence demanded a particular sequence of triggers, but the game also is very good about pruning items and dialogue options from the pool when they're done so it's never that hard to sort things out. It's also not a game that punishes mistakes or failure, both in terms of general design but also for plot reasons.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the custom engine that Powerhoof used to create The Drifter (and made freely available for anyone to use). You can use the usual keyboard/mouse control scheme, but if you play on controller it's a slick little affair, with the triggers managing your inventory, the left analog stick controlling character movement, and the right stick pulling up a radial menu of nearby hotspots/interactables. Not once in the 7-8 hours it took me to play through the game did I feel like it would be easier or better to start trying to use the Steam Deck touchpad as a mouse instead of just using the controller scheme. Great stuff.

The Drifter is absolutely worth a look if you enjoy point and click adventures, I binged it in a few sessions because it was interesting and compelling throughout.