Sixty Minutes With Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I.

I seem to have lurched from hardly being able to think of anything to write about at all to having a whole slew of ideas that can only be expressed in epic form. I just ran the last weeks' worth of posts through a word-counter and it came to more than seventeen thousand. That's ridiculous!

I have several more posts in mind that I know are going to go long but I'm going to sit on them for a while. If I leave it long enough, with luck I might forget about them altogether. 

I'm working all weekend, which will stem the flood in any event but I would like to spend today doing something other than writing, just for a change, so I'm going to limit myself to a review of a single demo from the Steam Next Fest. 

Seriously? You're going to review one demo? Is that a valid use of valuable resources?

Probably not but I'm gonna, anyway. I took some screenshots and I'm going use them, damn it!

The game in question, as must be obvious already to anyone who read my last Next Fest post, is Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I. Steam says I played it for two hours but Steam's easily fooled. In truth, I played for about half an hour, took an hour out to have tea and watch Eggheads with Mrs. Bhagpuss, like every other nearly-retired couple in England, then played for thirty minutes more. 

The demo lasts about sixty minutes or at least that's how long it lasted for me. I guess I might have missed something but I don't think so. Despite a strong warning at the start about how early-development the build is, it seemed very stable. I didn't encounter any bugs, glitches or problems at any point.

The demo also very helpfully tells you there's no option to save your progress. I wish all developers would exhibit a similar duty of care. That's why I left it running while I had tea, something the demo didn't seem to mind at all. I've known plenty of games to freeze and need a restart in similar circumstances but not this one.

The first thing the demo asks you to do is tell it whether you're using a controller or keyboard and mouse. I'm not sure why they even bothered with the keyboard. You could play this thing with one finger.

That's not a criticism. It's a recommendation. I loved the controls. They were super-simple, wholly intuitive and extremely comfortable to use. WASD to move, mouselook to turn, space bar to interact, cursor keys to select dialog options. Which, as I said, could be reduced even further to LMB/RMB and mouse-wheel to scroll. Then you could hold a drink in your other hand while you played.

I liked the controls and I liked the look. This is a great-looking game, provided you like watching shows from the dawn of the television era - grainy, shaky, out of focus, black and white...

That's how it struck me, although I suspect the look the art team was actually going for was more early talkies movie serial. The game's set in the prohibition era and that ended in 1933 so TV hadn't really got going yet. Then again, there were very few cats working as private investigators during the real prohibition, let alone deer in the police force or pigs practicing law (Insert your own joke here.) so the timeline's already corrupt.

The environmental art is so effective I spent longer than I should have trying to work out if it was heavily treated real-world video or computer graphics. It's the latter, of course, as is obvious from the indoor scenes, but some of the alleys and broken-down warehouse settings are very convincing.

The dialog is solid, too, or it is when it allows itself to be. There are some lengthy conversations between Albert and various people he already knows that have the authentic feel of long familiarity between old friends or at least acquaintances. 

When the writers try to be funny, though, things don't always go so well. I get that jokes about animals behaving like humans are a trope of these kinds of games but gags about licking your own butt get old fast. To have three or four of those in a sixty minute demo shows lack of judgment as well as lack of taste. Even the six nipples joke, which I hadn't heard before and thought was quite funny, doesn't work a second time.

There are also altogether too many metatextual winks and nods and I say that as someone who usually can't get enough post-post modern self-referentialism. If you're going to keep banging them in, they need to be sharper or smarter of preferably both.

Soundwise, the demo scores some points. Albert's thoughts get a prototypical noir voiceover that's not at all bad. The guy doing the voicework has a deep, growling timbre that works for both a PI and a cat and his line readings are fine. 

The music, something the promotional material makes much of, is okay but no more. It's the expected jazz-adjacent noodling every game like this always goes with. I wouldn't turn it down but I didn't really find myself noticing it much, either.

Gameplay in the demo is about as minimal as I've ever seen in one of these things. Anything you can examine is highlighted by a yellow dot. You can click on those and get a description. If it's interactable, it's underlined and you hold down the space bar to fill in the line. That sounds a little odd but I really liked it. It had a nice tactility to it that weirdly made just clicking on things feel pleasurable.

You can take things, although very rarely. There's no inventory in the traditional adventure game sense. On the very odd occasions the game allows you to pick something up it just adds a shadow icon to the left border so that, should you need to use it at any point, the game knows you have it ready.

The plot revolves around a murder, which seems to have some paranormal element to it, although with a setting like this it's honestly hard to tell what's supposed to be in-game "normal", which is presumably why all the characters have to keep telling each other exactly what's "weird" and what's not. Personally, I found the fact that every character wears clothes except the witness who found the body pretty weird. He's a flamingo and a professional dancer (It's a big plot point.) but if either of those is relevant to his state of undress it's not explained. 

Maybe birds go around naked in this world and no-one cares or maybe it's just dancers. It can't be dance teachers, though, because we meet one of those and she's fully dressed. Then again, she's a cow.

All in all, I felt it was an hour well spent. About the only even remotely original thing about Albert Wild: Quantum P.I., at least as revealed in the demo, is what it looks like. Everything else is extremely familiar from any number of other anthropomorphic noirs but I suppose that's like saying when you watch a tennis match all people keep doing is hitting the ball across the net. That said, I can't remember ever having had to convince a witness to talk to me by demonstrating my interpretive dance skills before...

I liked it enough to wishlist it, anyway. It is, as they said, a very early build but it shows a lot of promise. By far the weakest spot is the humor (Geez. Look who's talking.) but even that's not bad, just a little overdone. I did laugh a couple of times, if not very hard or loud.

One down, six to go. And that was only twelve hundred words. Getting there!

The Fest Next Time

Kluwes at Many Welps (Or, as it appears on my blog roll for some reason, I'm Not Squishy. I should probably update that...) was the first to alert me to the return of Steam's indie demo event, Next Fest. MagiWasTaken at Indiecator was next and no doubt a whole bunch of people will follow along soon enough. It's hard to resist such a smorgasbord of free gaming snacks, not to mention the way it makes for a series of very quick and easy to put together blog posts.

As I believe I've complained before, Valve does its very best to hide the festival in plain sight. I was logged into Steam all day yesterday and I still didn't notice it had started. Worse, even after I'd been alerted to its existence, it took me some time to find it on the chaotic "Features" page. I scrolled straight past it the first time.

I spent about thirty minutes flipping through the stacks of demos, looking for anything I might actually play. As usual, it was more of an annoyance than a pleasure. Even using the categories provided to winnow the chaff it's still heavy going and Steam itself does very little to make it easier. If there's a simple way to go back to the same place in the list after you've looked at a game's page, I couldn't find it.

You get what you pay for, as they say. I guess the upside of such an awkward, fiddly process is that it does save you from yourself. If it was easier, who knows how many demos I might have downloaded? 

As it was, I still ended up installing more of the things than I intended. My plan was to stick to just five. It seemed like a manageable number. Even with everything else that's going on I figured I ought to be able to play through five short demos and still have time to post about them before the festival ends and they stop working. They do that, some of them. 

I got caught that way last time. I missed out on a couple I left for too long. I don't think it's Steam's decision. I think it depends on the developer. Some of them are demos that are already up on Steam semi-permanently but others have been produced specifically for the event and switch off when it ends, or at least I think that's how it works.

In the end, I settled on eight titles. Seven I downloaded and one I added to my wishlist, not because I want to buy it but just to bookmark it for now. I chose not to install it immediately because the demo is gigantic by comparison to any of the others, over thirty times the size of the next-largest. That's because it isn't really a demo at all; it's the early access build of an mmo.

Tales of Wild is the game in question. Not, you'll note, tales of the wild, although since it's being developed by a Chinese studio that could be a wonky translation. Even though it's in the festival, I'm not sure it's really a demo and I'm not at all sure it's an mmo either. It's actually "an open world survival craft online game." because we really need another of those. I might get round to trying it at some point but I wouldn't count on it.

The seven titles I did download are all adventure games, most of them point-and-clicks. Here they are, in no particular order:

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit. "Legends of the past come back to life in this charming point-and-click adventure. Pack your bags and journey with Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit through modern day Europe to uncover the secrets of the king who was never crowned."

The first one I picked, mainly because the graphics are bright and cheerful and it looked like it might be light in more than one sense of the word. The last several times I've done this I've ended up with more badly-lit, horror-inflected games than would normally be my choice and I'd like to avoid doing that again if I can possibly manage it. Looking at the full description, I see it's "inspired by classics such as Broken Sword, Still Life, Syberia and others", which raises my hopes considerably. Let's hope it can live up to that list.

Night Cascades. "The city is on fire, and the Devil is to blame - or is it? Two women must solve an occult-themed mystery set in an alternate 1980s while unraveling the secrets of their past. Hunt for clues and interrogate suspects in this interactive yuri visual novel."

I had to look up "yuri visual novel" but it's nothing that wasn't already was pretty much covered by the LGBTQ+ tag. A 1980s setting, female protagonists, paranormal activity and a detective plot. Should be right up my street. About all it's missing is a cat. Oh, wait...

Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I. "Solve murders, flirt badly, maybe discover a wormhole to another universe? Also, you’re a cat. " 

This is the real outlier in the bunch. There's gameplay footage in the trailer of Albert driving a car and it looks more like a YouTube stunt than a video game. The music's fantastic, too. The game's set in the 1930s, it's in black and white and it uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, all of which I think is meant to make it feel like an early TV serial. It's also "First person controller from a cat's perspective", whatever that means. I'm looking forward to this one.

The Wreck. "Follow failed screenwriter Junon as she attempts to make it through the most pivotal day in her life. Relive the past, alter the present, and embrace the future - or watch Junon’s story end in a wreck."

I liked the graphics and its pitch - "a mature 3D visual novel about sisterhood, motherhood, grief and survival" - reminded me a little of Lake, about which I said "I really like Lake... The more games like this I play, the more I want to play." Don't say it if you don't mean it.

Intruder in Antiquonia. "Sarah doesn't remember who she is or how she got to Antiquonia. Help her solve the mysteries of her past as you explore this internet-hostile town to find the answers. A beautiful, hand-illustrated point-and-click adventure with a wonderful soundtrack."

I passed on this the first time. The title is awkward, the graphics look far from "beautiful" and we'll be the judge of how "wonderful" the soundtrack is, thank you. I'm not big on overselling. What got me to change my mind was this one line in the description: "Antiquonia, a fascinating town where the locals reject the Internet." Do they? Do they really? Why? Inquiring minds want to know!

Children of Silentown. "Children of Silentown is a dark adventure game that tells the story of Lucy, a girl growing up in a village deep in a forest inhabited by monsters. People disappearing is nothing uncommon here, but this time, Lucy is old enough to investigate on her own. Or so she thinks."

It was always too much to hope I'd get through this whole thing without a little horror creeping in somewhere. Not that I'm saying Lucy's a little horror. I'm sure she's lovely. They're nearly always called "Lucy", aren't they? I do feel I've played this game about a hundred times before or at least read about it. But then, I could say that about almost everything on this list and most likely everything in the entire Next Fest line-up. Originality isn't really much of a feature in indie gaming, is it? And who cares, frankly?  Not me. I'd rather see something familiar done well than something original done badly. This certainly looks the business. We'll see if it plays that way, too.

Lost in Play. "Go on a feel-good adventure with a brother and sister as they explore dreamscapes and befriend magical creatures. Lost in their imagination, Toto and Gal must stick together and solve puzzles to journey back home. This whimsical puzzle adventure game will make you feel like you're playing a cartoon!"

I'm not a hundred per cent sure about this one. The Steam page rams the word "puzzle" home every chance it gets and I'm not that big a fan of puzzling. I like point and click adventures where the answers are pretty obvious most of the time. The odd head-scratcher is okay but not in every scene. There's no dialog, either, which kind of undermines the whole concept of the genre to my way of thinking. Looks pretty, though.

And that's the lot. I might start on them tonight. If they turn out to be worth writing about then that's what I'll do. If I never mention them again, they probably weren't. Or else I never got around to playing them at all. One or the other.