The Drifter

You find yourself in a dimly lit catacomb. A grotesque monster with green eyes, cold and searching like laser beams, lurches towards you, its long, outstretched limbs resembling living samurai swords. You try to stab it with a blunt knife. A fatal decision. The monster impales you. Pain. White light. Rebirth.

You try again. This time you hide in a small nook. The monster trudges slowly on, its thin spider legs tickling your sweaty face, millimetres away. You have survived. But only a few seconds longer than last time. The moment you leave the shadows, you are impaled again. More pain. White light. Rebirth.

Based on this description, one might think that {The Drifter} was a difficult Soulslike game. Or a survival horror game. But no. It is something as simple as a good old-fashioned point & click game, and an excellent one at that.

Those are big words, but {The Drifter} proves its worth from the very first second. The game begins with vagabond Mick Carter arriving in his hometown in a freight car to attend his mother's funeral. Upon reaching the waterfront, the car is suddenly attacked by Sam Fisher-like special forces, and Carter's fellow travellers are riddled with bullets. That pretty much sets the tone.

{The Drifter} is not afraid to shock, and it doesn't take long before Carter himself suffers a terrible fate. He is captured, tied to an anchor and thrown into the cold and dirty harbour basin. As a player, you desperately try to find a solution, but no matter how much you click, there is nothing you can do. The screen fades to black. Carter dies.

And then he is brought back to life in a painful flash of light. Now you can untangle him, and the game can really begin.

The atmospheric screens between each chapter give the game an almost cinematic presentation, despite the pixelated graphics.

The central mystery of how you could survive your own death forms the basis of the game, but first there are more pressing questions. Who wants you dead? Why are homeless people mysteriously disappearing? And what happened to the journalist the agents caught at the same time they nabbed you?

The first half of the game is somewhat reminiscent of 90s classics such as {Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father} and {Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templar}. Using a map, you can move between a small handful of separate locations; the missing journalist's office, your ex-wife's home, the cemetery, and the aforementioned waterfront. Each location typically contains one or two people whom you must try to manipulate or distract. For example, the grumpy gravedigger won't let Carter into his mother's funeral, while the receptionist at the local newspaper neglects all her duties except one, keeping out nosy visitors.

It's standard point & click gameplay, but that doesn't matter, because the puzzles are both fun and, not least, logical. Yes, you still have to think outside the box, but only a little. As a vagrant, Mick Carter is used to getting by with limited resources, and you often have to use the same tools - such as a thermos flask, a knife, or a screwdriver - for several different puzzles. This makes the puzzles more realistic than in typical point & click games, where they often become a bit too MacGyver-esque.

Nor does the presentation seem revolutionary at first glance. Pixel graphics have dominated the genre since the early 2010s, but rarely have they been as well done as here. This is not least due to the effective use of light and shadow. Scenes are never static, and flickering lights, supplemented by effects such as rain and wind, create an atmospheric presentation. {The Drifter} proves that you don't need ray-tracing and photorealism to create atmospheric and vivid graphics.

The presentation of The Drifter is unparalleled.

What makes the presentation even more impressive is that it never gets in the way of the gameplay. {The Drifter} drops many of the support features that newer point & click games use, such as the ability to highlight objects or a built-in hint system. Yet at no point did I ever get seriously stuck, as important items and interactive objects are always clearly visible. The interface also helps here. If you have already examined an object and it is not relevant to your further progress, you can no longer click on it. Instead, your cursor turns into an X, and you get a written observation instead of a spoken line, a clever way to narrow down the player's scope of action.

Otherwise, all dialogue and observations are voiced with great precision and empathy. {The Drifter} takes place in Australia, and the slightly rough Australian dialect fits the tone of the game perfectly. Adrian Vaughan, in particular, is absolutely outstanding as our hard-pressed protagonist, and his many grumpy observations are softened by a genuine warmth, which makes Carter a thoroughly believable and likeable character, despite his many flaws. All the voice actors do a great job, though, and I was very surprised when I saw in the credits that it was only 5-6 people who had voiced the entire cast of characters. The game's synth soundtrack also deserves high praise, as it goes hand-in-hand with the game's plot and atmosphere.

Even the best voice acting cannot lift a script with poor dialogue and poor coherence, but fortunately, the story is just another parameter where {The Drifter} shines. As mentioned, it starts out as a thriller, but slowly the plot mutates and becomes more sci-fi-like, a bit like {The X-Files}. Yes, in the end, the plot actually goes completely off the rails, but the game's writer still manages to keep track of all the threads, and that's impressive, because there's a lot to keep track of. If I had to find something to complain about, certain characters perhaps lack a little depth, and the story sometimes flirts with melodrama and clichés. But overall, this is a very minor criticism.

Central to the game's plot is Mick Carter's mysterious resurrection at the beginning of the game. It quickly turns out that this is no cheap one-off miracle. No, Carter resurrects again and again. This very useful ability is cleverly integrated into the game's gameplay, especially in the many "boss scenarios," which are extremely pressured situations where the slightest mistake can lead to your death and immediate resurrection.

With very few possible actions, your task is to interact with the various hot spots in the correct order. No, it doesn't sound very exciting when described in such abstract terms, but in practice it works incredibly well, and hopefully the opening of this review gave you a little taste of what you can expect. The dialogue is short, desperate, and supports the wild action when, for example, you throw yourself out of a window, hanging from a power cable with a mysterious monster on your heels. You will die many times, but that's the point, because through this you learn from your mistakes and can eventually make a perfectly executed escape. Although it's a completely different gimmick that allows you to achieve perfection, it reminded me a little of {Superhot}.

You often have your back against the wall in The Drifter.

It's hard not to draw a parallel with the game's development, because {The Drifter} seems like a game that has learned from the many mistakes of the point-and-click genre and then created a near-perfect experience. The {Sierra}-like deaths do not hinder the game, but lift it to new heights, and the silly puzzles that often punctured the immersion in serious point-and-click games have been replaced here by polished and logical brain teasers.

Every once in a while, a game comes along that seems ground-breaking without necessarily introducing anything new. Instead, the game takes elements from other similar titles and mixes them together with such skill that the genre as a whole takes a step forward. We know this from open world games with {Grand Theft Auto III} or the FPS genre with {Half Life 2}. Now the point-and-click genre has also got such a game. Finding faults with {The Drifter} is as difficult as pixel hunting in classic point & click games, and therefore it naturally deserves the highest possible rating.