I was scrolling the Steam store aimlessly a few Saturdays past, avoiding my various anxieties and responsibilities as a professional, when I happened upon a game whose banner appeared to be the old guy from Darkest Dungeon digging a hole (I wasn’t looking very closely). Enticed by the prospect of hole-digging, I investigated further. It was a brand new point-and-click adventure called The Drifter, with a bleak art style and promises of a grand conspiracy to unwind. I never buy stuff at full price on a whim, but I made an exception this once.
The game tells the story of Mick Carter, the titular Drifter, and his attempt to return to his hometown and pay his respects to his recently departed mother. Mick is also homeless, has made a ton of terrible decisions leading up to the point where we meet him, and has caught a pretty rotten streak of luck as well. His circumstances are such that his major problems are often interrupted by very minor ones, which are nonetheless just as obstructive. How do you face your sister after all these years away? Well, first you have to find someone or something that will let you charge your dead phone, because you can’t face your sister if you can’t learn her address because your phone is dead. It does a lot of zooming in and out like this, big picture to small and back again.
The Drifter was conceived some seven years ago and was primarily developed by just two guys. Despite its limited resources, this game is incredibly ambitious. It wants to give the spotlight to a cranky homeless protagonist while also being just about as wide in scope as one can imagine with a linear plot. The Drifter is trying to completely revolutionize the way point-and-clicks play, but keep all the traditionalists happy as well. Despite these contradictions, it succeeds more than it has any right to.
I play a lot of point-and-clicks, and The Drifter sold itself partially on the idea that it had made this genre much easier to play on a controller. Traditionally, the controller experience with mouse-dominant games was to make the controller a really shitty mouse. The Drifter approaches controller implementation in another way, the way FPS developers do when they finally get around to making the console ports: aim assist. Your right stick essentially flicks between all the clickable things in the room, requiring literally zero pixel-hunting from the player. It’s so much easier, its not really even a question of which way to play. I would generally hesitate to make such a pronouncement, but it seems to me that every point and click after this one will be controller-first, with this configuration. It is more intuitive for anyone who games regularly, and it allows for the game to be faster paced, demanding more twitch-reaction skills from the player than any game I’ve played in the the genre.
Eschewing the conventions of point-and-clicks in such dramatic fashion would typically make me question a team’s passion for it, but these sickos live and breathe point-and-click design. This is not NORCO, with its simple puzzles and gentle tutorializing exposition dialog. The only way to solve The Drifter‘s next puzzle will involve slapping together coffee grounds and a makeup mirror in your inventory, and if you want to know to do that, you had better be reading all the item descriptions. The Drifter doesn’t think pixel-hunting is fun, but don’t let that give you the idea that these dudes wanted to make a simplified experience. This is not some Broken Age-ass baby shit. You better lock the fuck in.
The primary way The Drifter interacts with you is by pouring Adrian Vaughan’s voice into your ear canals, providing you a coarse, Australian-accented inner monologue that both tells you how Mick Carter feels and how Mick Carter wants to solve the problems he is presented with. Usually, Mick wants to run away. Son is dead? Marital Problems? Mom’s funeral? Framed for murder by a conspiracy of untold size and power? If it sucks, Mick Carter’s gonna hit the bricks. Despite his place as the ostensible protagonist, Mick is not your hero. He never lets you forget that if it was up to him, he’d be the fuck up outta here.
The interplay between Mick’s unrepentant emotional cowardice and the powers conferred on him both by the story and by the meta-narrative of being inside a video game is rather impressively implemented by the writers. Getting Mick to do basically anything at all is a bit of a chore, because he complains about everyone and everything (often for good reason). You don’t get to forget he is in charge. You might not mind stealing some guy’s shit while he is asleep, because it’s a video game, but Mick will not do that. You might not mind dying in a video game, but holy fuck, does Mick not let you forget that dying sucks. I don’t play many horror games, because I am a baby, so I may have a tainted sample, but not until this game did I realize how businesslike all other game characters generally are about meeting grizzly ends, just because of how vocal Mick Carter is about how bad a time he is having getting disemboweled or whatever.
The Drifter has been criticized for some sort-of-sloppy plot contrivances as the game attempts to tie a bow on its story. I can think of a few events that don’t totally make sense in hindsight, and I imagine that if I replayed the game I would find quite a few more. That being said, it is awfully hard to be mad at the game as you play it. Conspiracy stories are really difficult to pull off, and many better-resourced writers rooms have failed to keep it all together and deliver anywhere close to this well. The reason conspiracies exist in real life is that, to borrow a phrase from John Oliver, big events feel like they should have equally big explanations. It doesn’t seem possible that we might walk on the moon simply by paying a lot of smart people to work really hard, or that JFK could get smoked by literally just some guy. The truth is out there, but it is almost never as interesting or exciting as the wonder of investigating it.
But this is why all is basically forgiven with The Drifter. It pays the hell off, again and again. I forgive it for its contrivances because the game’s explanations for why these big events happen are always so fascinating, so worth the time necessary to find out, even if they are occasionally a bit muddled. This is made all the more impressive by just how many times the stakes are raised, how many twists the plot winds; this game has nine chapter demarcations and every single one ends with some sort of serious paradigm-shift cliffhanger. That’s tough to keep doing in a conspiracy story—generally, when you hit “Oh shit, everyone is in on it” or “It goes all the way to the top!” the writer had better say “Uno,” because they’re just about out of cards to play. What The Drifter does that I found really smart was understand those ideas are pretty played out and basically concede those points immediately. The real world we live in is so nakedly corrupt that stuff like that would feel phony to be hiding in a game. Instead, The Drifter keeps giving new reasons to stay involved. If it didn’t, Mick Carter would be quite content to run off and let the conspirators get away with it.
That this game got made at all is just incredibly impressive. There aren’t a lot of new things to do in storytelling, and I think the story The Drifter decided to tell absolutely required the new control system, or perhaps vice versa. Neither part would work without every other part being how it is, too. The result feels like a wild vision of the future—a rare future worth looking forward to.