The Drifter Review
The Drifter is an evolution of the point-and-click adventure, as it delivers a highly refined experience from top to bottom. Unfortunately, it might be a bittersweet symphony, but I’ll explain that shortly.
The Drifter immediately hooks you in with its captivating sci fi thriller narrative thanks to a supremely strong opening full of time travel, conspiracy and murder. Until the end, it flowed with nearly perfect pacing. The Drifter was well rounded with superb voice acting, a flawless gamepad experience and challenging puzzles that avoid the genre trope of being obtuse. There were a few minor issues, but nothing that detracted from the overall experience.
NOT JUST FOR FANS OF POINT AND CLICK
If you do a quick search for the best point and click adventure games, you’ll see that over 95% of them released in the mid to early 90’s, which is because the genre failed to adapt and evolve with the changing industry. Point and Click adventures felt hamstrung by how they found success in the first place with far fetched narratives and obtuse puzzles. Although The Drifter pays tribute to the pinnacle of the genre including a retro pixel art aesthetic, everything about it feels elevated.
In The Drifter, you play as Mick Carter, a homeless man who drifts from one place to the next after a traumatic experience in his life leaves him running from the pain. With the recent death of his mother, Mick must make a quick stop at his hometown for the funeral. At the core of The Drifter, there are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Despite how far fetched some of the plot can get at times, it always feels grounded due to the intimacy of the writing, which grounded the characters.
Typically, I don’t mind setting up the narrative by explaining what happens in the early portions of the game as that help provide background for the experience, but The Drifter begins like a bullet from a gun. Within minutes Mick is caught in the middle of a conspiracy including time travel, government testing, and serial killers.
The impact of the first chapter can’t be understated as it establishes such a strong tone with great hooks that the game will follow for the remainder of the experience. One the story is set up, you need to figure out what’s happening and get to the bottom of it, but your first order of duty is finding a way to charge your phone, which can be problematic for a drifter.
BINGE WORTHY
Most point and click adventure games hang their hat on the puzzles within and The Drifter offered a great selection that constantly rewarding common sense thinking. Early in the game you need to find a hose to fix a car with a bad fuel pump and what seemed logical was the washing machine that had been dumped at the homeless site. Once I found a knife to pry open the panel, there was a hose and all that was left was to cut it out and attach it to the vehicle. The puzzles were still challenging, and even when I would get stumped, the solutions always made sense.
At around ten hours, The Drifter is on longer end of the spectrum within the genre. However, The Drifter is broken into ten chapters that take about an hour each or roughly the length of your favorite show. In conjunction with this, they always ended either on a cliff-hanger or right after a big reveal where you wanted to know what happens next. Due to all of this, The Drifter felt as much like a refined point and click adventure as it did a binge worthy show on Netflix. It’s very hard to walk away from The Drifter once you start playing.
Powerhoof is only two people and while they might be working within their limits with the visuals, there are a lot of stylistic choices made throughout that show true artistry. For example, many scenes don’t take up the full screen and instead highlight and give it weight. The visuals of being trapped in a coffin or even the very first scene of the game where you are a stowaway on a train car are more impactful than they would be if they were in the middle of full screens worth of visuals.
OLD HABITS DIE HARD
Although The Drifter sidesteps a lot of the common issues with point and click adventures, there are still a few minor issues that slightly hinder the experience. As mentioned controls are optimized for a gamepad, which leads to the freedom to walk around, but unfortunately Mick can still get stuck in the environment. Sadly you cant just walk out using the thumbtacks, you need to open the radial action wheel to select an action to get him out.
Although the first chapter sets a high bar, which it was surprisingly able to maintain for the majority of the experience, there was a singular chapter near the end that lingered on longer than the rest and interrupted the flawless pacing The Drifter was delivering.
As mentioned, all of the puzzles in The Drifter felt fair and made sense once I figured out what needed to be done. However, there were still some very challenging ones and offering a small hint after about ten failures would be a nice addition.
The Drifter also lacked consistency at times. For starters, the game establishes certain logic of how the universe works, but at times breaks the logic itself. Despite, the extraordinary plot, The Drifter stays relatively grounded in realism, but it’s broken at times when Mick is able to carry almost anything at times. Simply giving the character a backpack would have been a logical solution. The other immersion issue were you had to suspend belief was when you would leave a certain scene only to return much later and the character to be exactly where you left them.
THE DRIFTER REVIEW VERDICT
Why do genres lose popularity? Is it changing technology? Over saturation? Whatever the reason, lack of evolution is always a common culprit. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, point and click adventures were at their peak. It seemed like some developers couldn’t make them fast enough, but even too much of a good thing is a problem
The Drifter intertwines time travel, trauma and conspiracies, the voice acting across the board is superb, the puzzles are challenging, but never obtuse and it avoids the common pitfalls of the genre. The biggest problem with The Drifter is its release year. It might be a bittersweet symphony, as it’s one of the best point-and-click games in years, possibly even decades.
Unfortunately, sometime during the mid to late 90s, the majority of the audience moved on, and the genre has become relatively niche. The Drifter is a must for fans of the golden era of the point and click genre, but thanks to its refinement, it’s also for anyone who loves a good sci-fi thriller adventure.
