Tag Archives: adventure games

Ace Attorney: evolving the Japanese adventure game formula

Playing through the two Famicom Detective Club games got me well and truly in the mood for some more adventuring. And so it was that I finally booted up the Nintendo Switch version of the first Ace Attorney Trilogy that I’ve had on my shelf for quite some time.

I’ve previously played all the Ace Attorney games except for the sixth one (and The Great Ace Attorney, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… and the unlocalised second Ace Attorney Investigations game) so I already know the series quite well, but it’s been a good few years since I sat down and gave them some proper attention.

Moreover, I’ve somehow gone this long without ever writing about them here on MoeGamer, so today’s the day we fix that. Perhaps not for the last time, either.

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Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind – a truly compelling mystery

The Famicom Detective Club games are something that I’d been meaning to get around to for a while, but have only just picked up. Having played through — and adored — first episode The Missing Heir, I was keen to follow that up with its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.

Honestly, I was expecting more of the same, and to a certain extent that’s what you get with The Girl Who Stands Behind, at least in mechanical terms. From a narrative perspective, however, The Girl Who Stands Behind is arguably considerably more ambitious than its predecessor, and makes for a mystery even more compelling to unravel a bit at a time.

So let’s take a closer look at the 2021 remake from Nintendo and Mages, available as part of a double-pack with The Missing Heir — sadly, only digitally in its English language incarnation.

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Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and the Japanese adventure game tradition

Although Japanese-style adventure games are a bit of an acquired taste for some, I’ve become rather fond of the format over the years.

While the more “pure” visual novel format is considerably more commonplace these days, it does always make me smile when a new game comes out that makes use of those classic Japanese adventure game conventions rather than simply being “click to advance, perhaps with occasional choices”.

As such, I had been meaning to get around to the two Famicom Detective Club titles on Switch for quite some time. And, having played through the first of the duology, subtitled The Missing Heir, I feel compelled to talk about it at some length. So let’s do just that.

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The term “adventure game” no longer has any meaning

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed adventure games — mostly those of the point-and-click variety, but I’m certainly not averse to those with text parsers, or which are entirely text.

Trouble is, these days it’s actually surprisingly (and annoyingly) difficult to track down genuine examples of these without also being confronted with a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. I made the mistake of clicking on a GamesRadar piece about “the 25 best adventure games to get swept up in right now” earlier — obvious SEO-optimised clickbait, in retrospect — and literally three out of the 25 games were actual adventure games.

The rest? Far Cry. Hogwarts Legacy. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Fucking Skyrim. Not only did the list completely lack any established classics of the adventure game genre that are easily accessible today — such as any of the old Sierra and LucasArts titles that are on Steam and/or GOG.com — but it also seemingly completely misunderstood what the term “adventure game” actually means.

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Atari ST A to Z: Deja Vu

The time has come once again for adventure! AtariVenture, to be exact — the Atari ST ports of Icom Simulations’ MacVentures series.

Today we’re looking at Deja Vu, a hard-boiled detective thriller in which you play Theodore “Ace” Harding, who has just woken up in a toilet with a sore arm and no memory of who he is. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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short;Play: Rise of the Dragon

Adventure games — particularly point-and-click affairs from the ’90s — are a genre I’ve loved for a long time. And one of my all-time favourites from back in the day is Rise of the Dragon, a futuristic dystopian adventure by Dynamix that feels all the more plausible today.

Taking on the role of William “Blade” Hunter, trenchcoat-wearing private detective extraordinaire, it’s your job to investigate the strange and horrifying death of the mayor’s daughter, stop the spread of a deadly DNA-altering drug and prevent the resurrection of an ancient Chinese wizard who really wants to take over Los Angeles for some reason. I say he’s welcome to it; LA’s a shithole now, and it looks even worse in the future.

Check out my full playthrough of this adventure game classic in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Brok the InvestiGator: Punch and Click Adventuring

It’s been a good few years since the point-and-click adventure was a “mainstream” part of gaming now. That’s not to say the genre is dead, mind — more that these days it tends to be the exclusive preserve of smaller, independent developers rather than big studios like LucasArts.

And those games from smaller, independent developers aren’t in any way “lesser” than the games from the golden age of adventure games, either — in fact, in the case of games like Brok the InvestiGator, they represent what would have been the natural evolution of the genre if the mainstream hadn’t become so obsessed with gritty photorealism and cinematic open-world experiences.

In short, Brok the InvestiGator, whose Prologue chapter is presently available for free from both Steam and GOG.com at the time of writing, is something very special indeed. And it deserves your attention. So let’s take a closer look!

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The Immortal: How To Kill Your Wizard

If you are a glutton for punishment, or just feel that modern video games are a touch on the easy and/or fair side for you, it’s high time you checked out Will Harvey’s classic 1990 title, The Immortal.

As it happens, at the time of writing it’s just become easily accessible in not one, but two different places: you can now play the NES version as part of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and the Mega Drive version appears as part of the Piko Interactive Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system.

It’s the latter version we’ll be focusing on today, but expect similar amounts of death in both. Roll up your sleeves, and let’s get mortal.

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Check Out My Prison Princess Review!

Full article coming later today, but this is super-important to acknowledge: the commercial, mainstream outlet Nintendo Life was kind enough to give me the opportunity to write about qureate’s new point-and-click puzzle adventure game for Nintendo Switch, Prison Princess.

This is noteworthy because it marks a substantial shift in the site’s editorial policy: they’re now keen to specifically seek out specialist writers for more niche-interest games such as shoot ’em ups or games with provocative ecchi content, rather than passing them to staff writers less familiar with the cultural context or background of such works. This will hopefully lead to fewer situations where there’s a huge disconnect between a critic and the target audience of a particular game. And hopefully more articles from people like me and their new, frighteningly knowledgeable shmup specialist!

I’d like to heartily thank Damien McFerran from Nintendo Life for the kind opportunity to write about this game — and for the site’s admirable new approach. And I would please encourage you, dear reader, to support this change in outlook: it’s exactly the sort of thing we need to see happening on more mainstream sites. It deserves rewarding.

And a great way to do that is simply to go and check out my review of Prison Princess over on Nintendo Life — you can do that by clicking right here!

Thanks for your support, and I hope you enjoy the review.

Pete

My Big Sister: Blood-Red Pixels

I’m not sure exactly when a lo-fi pixel art aesthetic came to be associated with horror games, but I’ve always rather liked the juxtaposition between supposedly “primitive” visuals and the primal emotion that is fear.

We can probably trace the whole thing back to classic NES survival horror RPG Sweet Home, but it seems to have become particularly popular with the indie sphere in recent years, with titles such as Lone Survivor, Home and various rereleases of Corpse Party all fully embracing the “retro horror” aesthetic.

My Big Sister, a pixel art horror adventure for all the current major platforms, follows this mould, but does a few interesting things all of its own. So let’s take a step into the darkness and see what’s going on!

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