It is the late 1800s. Thomasina Bateman is a young woman from a well-off background whose father was an accomplished archaeologist, and encouraged her interest in his work from a young age. A terrible accident has left the elder Bateman paralysed and unable to speak for decades – but Thomasina continues his work, and is preparing a volume documenting the ancient burial mounds of the British Isles.
Just recently, Thomasina has received a letter from the mysterious Leonard Shoulder, telling her of a curious mound that might make perfect subject matter for her book – Hob’s Barrow, near the sleepy rural village of Bewlay. Travelling by train to the remote branch line station serving Bewlay, Thomasina is struck by the lonely landscape of the surrounding moors and the isolation of the village. She is also perturbed that Leonard Shoulder doesn’t seem to be around to meet her – or that Kenneth, her assistant who was meant to be coming up with her excavation equipment, doesn’t arrive on the next day’s train as agreed.
Short on funds and facing a wave of suspicion from the locals, Thomasina must somehow cultivate local allegiances, locate the barrow, get permission to excavate from the landowner, and hire on local help. As she works to accomplish these goals, Thomasina endures troubling dreams, is struck by moments of reminiscence about her father, and is embroiled in strange incidents. Yet none of these omens are enough to dissuade her from The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow…
This 2022 release was developed by Cloak and Dagger Games, a small development team with the misfortune to be sniped in the Google results for their name by a conspiracy theory website about gangstalking. Prior to this, Cloak and Dagger have put out a range of other indie point and click adventures, but Hob’s Barrow – known as Incantamentum for most of the development process – is by some margin their highest-profile release yet, thanks to the game getting picked up for publication by Wadjet Eye. As I’ve documented on here, Wadjet Eye represent the gold standard these days as far as classic-style point and click adventures made by small, independent teams go. Originally a vehicle for Dave Gilbert to put out his own games, Wadjet would later expand into publishing the work of other solo and small team adventure game developers, and Gilbert has generally shown excellent taste in selecting games to give the Wadjet Eye seal of approval to.
It’s fair to say that when it comes to recent point-and-click adventures, Wadjet Eye are one of the hottest publishers in the field right now, having spent some 15 years putting out a regular stream of high-quality games. I slept on their output for a while, but I’m catching up, so here’s a review of two games of theirs from 2012. As with much of their output, they were both produced using the Adventure Game Studio development software, but whilst the annual AGS Awards showered one of them with prizes, the other one was almost totally snubbed. Let’s see how fair that was…
Primordia
At an indeterminate point in the future, humanity is extinct, but human creations live on. The crashed airship UNNIIC rusts in a vast wasteland; the robot Horatio Nullbuilt spends his days attempting to repair it with the aid of Crispin, the wise-cracking floating buddy he made out of spare parts. Horatio is on Version 5, which means he’s been rebuilt several times; his memory of his origins, and those of UNNIIC, are fuzzy to say the least, but he takes solace in the religion of Humanism, which teaches that a deity called Man created machines to maintain the world on Man’s behalf.
One day, a big mean-looking robot busts through UNNIIC‘s hull and steals the power core, leaving the ship powered down. Doomed to starve for want of energy if they don’t retrieve it or something of an equivalent power level, Horatio and Crispin must activate auxiliary power, scan the wasteland for energy spikes, and see what they can scavenge. It soon becomes apparent that to complete their quest they must go to Metropol – the greatest, and indeed only, city of the age. Crispin is excited to see the big city – but something in Horatio’s core programming makes him highly averse to it. Little does he know that in Metropol he will find not just the power source, but his own history – and more about the fall of Man and the rise of the robots than is good for his peace of mind.
New York, 1921: Alfie Banks spends his days beavering away as the star salesman of the Morris and Banks real estate company, a firm founded by his late father. One chilly winter day, his co-workers – envious of his success, perhaps not without reason since old Mr. Morris gives Alfie all the best leads – frame Alfie in a Glengarry Glen Ross-esque lead-stealing escapade, which results in Alfie being fired.
Embittered by this turn of events, Alfie ups stakes and heads down to Miami, where a real estate boom is taking place. George Merrick is intent on developing Coral Gables, “the City Beautiful”, and Alfie realises he can make it big if he can just make himself indispensable to the project. As the years pass, Coral Gables goes from strength to strength – but the tentacles of organised crime begin weaving their way into the city’s fabric. These create new temptations for Alfie – especially as he finds himself feeling overshadowed and undervalued by Merrick…
A Golden Wake is the commercial debut of Grundislav Games, a small adventure game development house that essentially consists of Francisco Gonzalez and anyone who happens to be helping with his projects. The key word there is commercial debut: before putting together A Golden Wake, Gonzalez had produced numerous freeware adventure games, primarily made using Adventure Game Studio (as, indeed, was A Golden Wake).
Whilst the survival of the point-and-click adventure through the mid-2000s was largely down to the efforts of European studios, thanks to the genre having historically fared better in the European market than in the US, American developers also had a role to play. Telltale Games are obviously worth a mention, considering that they were founded by refugees from LucasArts and the way the monster success of their first season of The Walking Dead really helped point-and-clicks feel like a modern, current genre that could still be commercially relevant, rather than a retro field best served by indies and bedroom programmers.
That said, let’s not discount those indie studios and bedroom programmers. After all, if we’re serious about wanting an alternative to the excesses of the higher end of the videogame industry – with their triple-A games whose content must be balanced and adjusted for as wide an audience as possible, ultimately making the industry just as conservative as the blockbuster end of movie-making, and with working practices based around hideous grind, exploitation, and turning a blind eye to abominable behaviour on an Ubisoft-esque scale – then we’ve got to stay open to the other end of the scale, with people crafting games on a self-employed basis or with a limited team with (hopefully, but not always) less hierarchical abusive bullshit than the big guns.
When it comes to US-based development houses focusing on point-and-click adventures and emerging from humble origins and the do-it-yourself scene, rather than originating with industry insiders, then the big name in both commercial reach and critical acclaim these days has to be Wadjet Eye. These days, Wadjet Eye is both a developer and a publisher – Gemini Rue, which I reviewed previously and greatly enjoyed, is one of the various games cooked up by third parties that Wadjet Eye have published.
Back in the day, Wadjet Eye had its origins as the outlet for the designs of Dave Gilbert. Gilbert got his start as part of the hobbyist community working with Adventure Game Studio (which does for point-and-click adventures what RPG Maker does for JRPGs), becoming a significant early contributor to the field at a time when Yahtzee and his Chzo Mythos games were probably the most celebrated names there. Gilbert’s pre-commercial work saw him becoming a regular nominee and winner in the AGS awards (and indeed he has been a regular winner there since, finally overtaking Yahtzee’s record of total awards won in 2018).
In fact, Wadjet Eye’s first game, The Shivah, was a polished and improved version of a game which Gilbert produced for the AGS community’s “write a game in one month” contest in June 2006. The Shivah won the contest handily, Gilbert decided to beef it up for a commercial release, and the rest is history, with Wadjet Eye continuing to produce Gibert’s designs to this day. (Indeed, before they started publishing games from third parties in the 2010s, all of Wadjet Eye’s releases were Dave Gilbert designs.)
But as important as The Shivah is to the studio’s history, it isn’t their bread and butter and it isn’t Dave Gilbert’s most famous release. His most commercially prominent and widely-recognised effort is the Blackwell sequence, a five-game point-and-click saga. (His latest game, Unavowed, is not part of the main series but is, to my understanding, connected to it.) In a way, Blackwell preceded The Shivah, since the basic concept was used by Gilbert for a rudimentary demo entitled Bestowers of Eternity in 2003 before the concept got revisited, polished up, and released commercially as The Blackwell Legacy, Wadjet Eye’s second commercial release of 2006 (coming just three months after the commercial version of The Shivah). The final game in the sequence, The Blackwell Epiphany, came out in 2014, making Blackwell a significant accomplishment in the adventure game field in the sense of being a fully-realised series with a beginning, middle, and an end, designed by the same creator and released by the same publisher throughout.
In fact, I can’t think of anyone from the golden age of adventure gaming who actually accomplished anything similar except Lori and Corey Cole and the Quest For Glory series. Every other significant LucasArts or Sierra series was either handed off to other designers at some point (Space Quest, Police Quest, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Maniac Mansion, Laura Bow), or wasn’t trying to tell a complete story arc with a beginning, middle and end over the span of the series (King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Phantasmagoria), or got cancelled before it could put out planned continuations of the story (Gabriel Knight, Torin’s Passage), or some combination of those factors.
Even Quest For Glory has a bit of an asterisk next to it, since the Coles did not have complete creative freedom in the same way that Gilbert has enjoyed for Blackwell; they had to rapidly knock off Quest For Glory III, which threw off their plans for the series, and Quest For Glory V ended up being a more combat-oriented RPG with some adventure game aspects, rather than the more even blend of adventure and RPG elements that the previous games had been. Conversely, the Blackwell games began as point-and-click adventures, ended as point-and-click adventures, and so far as I can tell haven’t required Gilbert to knock out a “filler” entry in the series to make time.
To that extent, Gilbert’s accomplishment is impressive – but it’s one thing to successfully tell your planned story from beginning to end, another for that story to actually be good. Did he stick the landing? Let’s see…
This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.
One of the benefits of backing Double Fine Adventure is that the backer forums are stuffed with people who have kept in much closer touch with the point-and-click adventure scene over the past few decades than I have, and consequently have some inkling of what’s hot and what’s not (even if this is filtered through an audience who will tend to get enthusiastic for any game in the genre which isn’t inept on a Limbo of the Lost scale).
One recommendation which came up there regularly is Gemini Rue, an indie point-and-click written by Joshua Nuernberger using Adventure Game Studio and published through Wadjet Eye Games. (You can get it on Steam or GOG.) In terms of its graphics and interface is more or less in keeping with point-and-clicks of the genre’s 1990s zenith; the controls incorporate both inventory and command verbs into a small box which appears when you right-click on something, thus maximising screen real estate without reducing your interactions with things to “look at something” and “interact with something” as some late-period point-and-clicks did, and I think there’s occasional bits of graphical flair which old 486 machines would have struggled with (like the rain), but by and large if you have played any vintage graphical adventures you will find this format very familiar and if you haven’t it shouldn’t be too difficult to get to grips with.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 