The Drifter is a new point-and-click adventure game from Powerhoof that I have been very into these past couple of weeks. It’s a game that owes a debt to many influences, all of which end up being a perfect match for this story, genre and, most importantly of all (for me), setting.
First and most obviously it owes a lot to the Lucasarts adventure games of the 90s, a subgenre that has inspired countless successors and imitators over the decades, but few--if any--that have felt as close to the source as this. Playing The Drifter is like visiting a parallel timeline where Lucasarts never went 3D after Full Throttle, and instead simply iterated on their existing art style over and over and at some point came up with, somehow, an even smarter interface.
But this is not a breezy adventure with a slapstick pirate and a load of double entendres, nor is it a game content to simply trace over the lines of a 30-year-old genre. The Drifter's own promos say the game draws heavily from "King, Crichton and Carpenter, with a dash of 70s Ozpolitation", and those are all correct. The Drifter has a mood, nailing its self-proclaimed "pulp adventure thriller brief" absolutely, the whole thing dripping with atmospheric lighting and intrigue, a sci-fi noir vibe brought to life by some incredibly cool pixel art and voice acting.
It also calls itself a fast-paced adventure game, a sentence that makes no sense until you play it, then it makes perfect sense. While in some ways this is a traditional point-and-click adventure game, it's not the type to keep you stuck on a puzzle for 10 hours; between its snappy interface, in-game hints, action sequences (I can't explain these without spoiling a central story element, but just trust me, they work) and relentless pacing, it really does keep moving at a brisk rate, which doesn't just remove a long-standing roadblock with this genre but also helps keep the story zipping along.
Were this all I wanted to talk about--me taking time out of your day just to say "this is the best Lucasarts homage I've ever played"--I think The Drifter would be worth talking about! Its story of grief, love, murder and monsters plays like you're clicking rapidly through a pulpy graphic novel, and nailing that Lucasarts energy is hard! Those games were magic, making this magic by association!
But what really got me about The Drifter was how Australian it is. Let me explain: Australia has enjoyed an indie renaissance over the past decade, a recovery from the dark days of the late 00s/early 2010s when a AAApocalypse closed all of the country's major studios. From Hollow Knight to Crossy Road, Goose Game to Cult of the Lamb, Plucky Squire to Unpacking, many of the best and most important games of the last few years have been developed in Australia.
And almost none of them have anything to say about living here, or being from here, or just here. That's fine, nobody is obligated to make their game about anything, you can set it whenever and wherever you want. But when you live outside the US, Japan or Europe as a player, you're almost always playing games about other people's homes and other people's stories, and sometimes, just sometimes, I wish there were more video games set a little closer to home.
Of course the problem here is that even when a game is set here, depictions of Australia in popular culture tend to skew towards a spectrum of caricatures: Mad Max on one end, Crocodile Dundee on the other. Which is fine, but also sometimes I just want to play video games where the characters are Australian and they use Australian slang and the game is set here, but that setting doesn’t really doesn't matter, in a way that I would find nice but you (statistically most people reading this are not Australian) could play it and not mind either, the same way I (an Australian) find Yakuza or KRZ interesting.
(Wayward Strand is a good example of what I’m talking about!)
The Drifter is very much set here, and has some of the most Australian voice acting I've ever heard in a game, but it's also extremely relaxed about it. Like yeah, this is an Australian video game, but it's not interested in cringe or tropes, desert vistas or kangaroos, it just wants to tell a very cool story that just happens to be set here. This is exactly what I've been after in an Australian game for a while now, so I'm very thankful to have got the chance to play through it here.
