Video games love a likeable hero. If you’re going to be spending dozens of hours unraveling their stories, it makes sense that you’d want a protagonist you can look up to. You don’t play as a lot of characters who skip out on their families when they need them and only begrudgingly attend their own mother’s funeral, which is just one way a new point-and-click adventure on PC feels like nothing else I’ve ever played.
The Drifter got a July 17 release date earlier this year, a mere eight years after its development began. That’s a long time for any game to spend in the oven, but it’s clearly paid off for developer Powerhoof, as The Drifter is a phenomenal, unique adventure that’s wriggled its way deep into my brain since I first started playing.
The Drifter is a dark thriller perfect for fans of pulpy sci-fi.
The Drifter stars Mick Carter, who begins the story by hopping a box car back to his hometown for his mother’s funeral, years after running away after his son’s demise. As his ex-wife later points out, that time he didn’t even stick around for the funeral. Mick has had a hard life, going in and out of homelessness since childhood, and while he’s easy to empathize with, he’s also kind of a prick, making him the perfect lead for this gritty thriller.
Powerhoof cites the films of John Carpenter as an inspiration for The Drifter, which you can feel in both the game’s choice of a run-down protagonist and its focus on downtrodden people in depressing settings. You’ll explore makeshift encampments under bridges, rain-soaked cemeteries, and run-down newspaper offices, before the game takes an even darker turn midway through and sends you into corpse-filled basements and secret laboratories.
Like Carpenter, The Drifter puts its very human protagonist up against a shocking supernatural mystery. At the start of the game, Carter watches a man get gunned down before a reporter is snatched by masked soldiers who dump him in the river with a weight tied around his feet. Carter soon dies himself for the first of what will be many times, but he always returns to life a few moments prior with full knowledge of what’s about to happen.
The Drifter is as gorgeous as it is grimy.
Powerhoof
That kicks off a thriller that starts with Carter running from cops who think he’s a murderer before delving into conspiracy theories and fringe science, all with the pulpy tone of a sci-fi B-movie. There’s a grimy feel to the story right from the start, with some truly nightmarish turns coming as Carter becomes increasingly desperate to escape crooked cops, serial murderers, mad scientists, and monsters. That tone won’t work for everyone, but the more The Drifter rolled around in the muck, the more I appreciated its commitment to the realm of the trashy sci-fi thrillers that inspired it. And as dark as the story gets, it remains gorgeously illustrated, with impressive pixel art that’s accompanied by a wonderfully moody synth soundtrack.
If you do have the stomach for the story, you’ll be rewarded with an extremely well-made point-and-click adventure. While it requires some logical leaps and a lot of backtracking, especially in its middle chapters, its puzzles are always satisfying. As far as the story goes into sci-fi, the solutions to your problems are always grounded, requiring some trial and error, but mostly solid reasoning, to keep the mystery moving.
The Drifter is one of the best point-and-click games in years.
Powerhoof
Mechanically, the most surprising part of The Drifter is how well it works with a controller. Played this way, moving the right joystick will show every interactable object and character close to Carter on a small wheel that appears at his feet, which you can select by tilting the joystick toward them and pressing the trigger. The shoulder buttons let you scroll through your inventory, and then you can use items on the environment with the same combination of joysticks and triggers.
Despite a meandering middle and the occasional annoyance of having to repeat puzzles after a wrong guess leads to Carter’s unceremonious end, I loved every moment of The Drifter. Its puzzles and point-and-click mechanics kept me on the hook, but it’s the pulpy sci-fi story, all narrated in a wonderfully gruff voiceover by Adrian Vaughan as Carter, that made it impossible to put down. For fans of the genre, the eight-year wait was well worth it.
