The Drifter is an upcoming point-and-click adventure game thriller with a demo currently available on Steam as part of The Game Festival. It sets its tone right away, as the main character Mick Carter narrates about how he never planned to return to his home city. Now he’s been forced to return for his mother’s funeral, which might also mean facing his ex-wife. He isn’t looking forward to any of this.
Mick’s narration adds a lot to the pulp noir atmosphere The Drifter is going for, especially since the narration is separate from the character dialogue. Occasionally Mick interrupts his own narration by talking to himself, which made me feel the distinction between narration and dialogue should have been a little stronger, but overall it’s a good effect. The best part is that Mick narrates his actions, so solving a puzzle or picking up a key item feels like it’s a part of this noir story.
As the train pulls into the city, Mick finds he can’t open the door. Since there’s a man sleeping in the train car with him, he wakes him up–only for the man to threaten him with a piece of rebar while raving about how he must break the cycle.
Assuming it’s all nonsense, Mick gets the rebar away from him and uses it to force the door open. That’s when things take a turn for the worse. Unknown gunmen shoot the other man dead, and Mick barely escapes with his life. Shortly afterwards, he gets a call from his sister about the funeral, but his phone goes dead before he’s able to get her address. Your next objective is to find a way to charge Mick’s phone so he can call his sister back and find out where he should go.
This shift in priorities from “I was just shot at” to “I need to get my sister’s address so I can attend the funeral” felt a little jarring to me, but Mick seems like a pretty cynical protagonist, so maybe being shot at didn’t disturb him as much as it should have. Anyway, Mick begins looking for a way to charge his phone, dealing with an old friend and a young reporter in the process.
The gameplay is pretty standard for a point-and-click adventure game. Your cursor changes depending on if and how you can interact with something in the environment, you can use items from your inventory to solve puzzles, and you can talk to characters about a variety of topics to help with your puzzle-solving.
As Mick works on the problem at hand, he picks up rumors about strange disappearances and people going crazy. Finally, he has everything he needs to charge his phone, but when he returns to the place where left it, the phone is gone. Soon he hears screams and finds mysterious masked men dragging away the reporter he met earlier. Although Mick (and the player) looks for a way to help, someone attacks him from behind.
Then he dies.
This next sequence is the most interesting in the demo, as Mick is trapped underwater and drowning while you search for a way to escape. When you fail, he drowns. Then he comes back again, aware of what happened. In this way, you finally solve the puzzle and Mick swims to safety even as he questions what happened to him. This is intriguing from both a story and gameplay perspective, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this revival mechanic works in the full game.
While the demo for The Drifter only provides a hint of the story to come, it sets up a solid noir atmosphere and gives just enough of the story to have me interested in learning just what is going on.
