Back To Back To The Future, Again.

As promised, here's my review of the seventh and final demo I chose to try during the recent, now ended, Steam Next Fest. It's called Unusual Findings and the bland, bleh name is about the only thing about it I didn't like.

That's may be a little surprising, given my previous comments on the 8-bit revivalist movement. As someone who suffered those tawdry graphics purely by necessity at the time, the incessant harking back to an era where everything looked blurry and pixelated mystifies me. By this logic, there should be a boom in 14" CRT monitors right now and we should all be spending our evenings watching network TV shows on the black and white portable TVs in our bedrooms.

The thing is, I've now played so many of these things I feel I must be getting Stockholm Syndrome. My brain is filling in the visual gaps and adding detail that was never there so they look almost attractive at times. They're not, of course. They're functional at best. I'd far rather have better graphics, by which I mean ones in which objects are recognizeable by their appearances rather than just by the labels that pop up when you mouse over them.

What I would say in favor of the better among the 8-bit nostalgia trips is that modern design sensibilities and a strong sense of historical irony does mitigate considerably against the self-imposed limitations of the form. Some games lean heavily into making the look do the work; this one plays with the knowingness of the audience.

Let's be clear; Stranger Things Season One is the model here. Set in the 'eighties, Unusual Findings rings every bell it can find to start your nostalgia glands drooling. And it works, even on me. When the first cut scene opened to the sound of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round I was right back there, watching Pete Burns camping it up on Top of the Pops in 1985.

Kudos to developers ESDigital for licensing an actual eighties classic. It really adds... well, I was going to say gravitas but I guess I mean authority. One thing that really has changed since the 8-bit era is the dominant role popular music played in the culture. Back then, the charts were the unavoidable gateway to acceptance as part of the zeitgeist. You might have been the gothiest goth in gothtown but you still knew what was Number One. Everyone did. These days? Yeah, me neither.

So, Unusual Findings is set in the 1980s and does it's best to look as though it was made then, too. It's a very specific version of the 'eighties we're talking about, naturally; the decade that gave us Weird Science, Back to the Future and The Goonies - because of course it fricken' is! Funny how it's never the 'eighties of Delicatessen, Jean de Florettes and Paris, Texas, isn't it? Or even Duran Duran, Thirtysomething and Magnum P.I.... at least there's a nod to The Blues Brothers in the opening credits.

Here's the plot as revealed in the demo: Vinny, a boy in his early teens, is home, grounded, because he and his pals, Tony and Nick, somehow managed to blow up a neighbor's garden doing "research". After a tough love lecture from his dad, who tells Vinny how proud he is of him for acknowledging his mistakes then locks him in his bedroom anyway, Vinny shows just how much he's learned from the experience by escaping via a zip-line from his window to the treehouse, where his buddy Nick is waiting. Together, the two kids jump on their bikes and cycle to Tony's house, where he convenmiently lives with his stone-deaf grandma, all of them willing to break every rule in the book for a chance at a night of "free adult cable".  

Tony, the real boffin of the gang, has already done all the complicated, technical stuff off-camera, so all the guys need to do is switch on the set and tune in the aerial to make their hormonal dreams come true, only instead of naked girls, all they get are some weird flashing lights - on every channel. Just then a flaming object plunges past the window and crashes somewhere in the depths of Green Woods, just outside town. Guess what happens next?

Well, I didn't expect a pack of wolves, I'll tell you that. Nor the shocking thing that happened after. 

Based on the demo, Unusual Findings has a good plot and a better script. Those are both fairly standard in point and click adventures, I'm pleased to say, but it also has excellent direction, which is a lot more unusual. As a game that pays homage to movies, this does a pretty good job of feeling like one. The opening credit sequence, which runs immediately after you solve the simple problem of the first location and get Vinny out of his bedroom, is particularly well done.

Less impressive is some of the voice acting, although not for the reasons you might expect. The three leads are all competent enough and the line readings are mostly convincing but there's an occasional tendency towards hysteria that doesn't sit all that well with the source material. A couple of lines come across awkwardly, very much an adult play-acting a teenager getting over-excited rather than a convincingly hyped-up teen. 

The weirdest thing, though, especially since all three voices sound authentically American, is the moment when one of them namechecks "Wile E. Coyote" and calls him "Willy E. Coyote". It's not some kind of in-character joke, either, as the subtitles make clear and the tone of the actor suggests the name means absolutely nothing to him.

Leaving aside how that ever got past the edit, it's not even a native speaker's misread. Assuming you'd never seen a Roadrunner cartoon and had no idea who Wile E. Coyote was, you still wouldn't say it like that. "Wile" is never pronounced "Willy" in either standard British  or American English. It's a second-language error.

Other than a few nit-picks, the voice acting is fine and anyway the game is fully titled so if it gets on your nerves you can just turn it off in Settings. All the controls are eminently sensible, with a single left-click on any interactable object bringing up a tripartite menu allowing you to Search, Look At or Talk To whatever you have targetted. If you Search and there's something you can use, the game automatically pops it into your inventory.

There are only a handful of puzzles in the demo, all of which are easily solved. There's barely even any Adventure Game Logic to handwave away. I could imagine doing the things that have to be done in the game and doing them the way they're done, which is highly unusual. Granted, they'd be more likely to happen in a movie than real life but they're certainly possible.

The demo took me almost half an hour to finish and the time flew by. I enjoyed some of the knowing period references, which seemed to me to have a little more irreverence about them than these things often do. The scene where Tony unknowingly outs himself as a future Brony is particularly sweet.

As always, a plea from the developers to add the game to my wishlist appeared at the end, a request with which I happily complied, only to find the game has already been released. It's currently on sale with a launch discount of 15%. Full UK price is £15.99, which seems very reasonable. 

Even so, I think I'll wait for a bigger discount in a later sale. I seem to have something of a surfeit of  point-and-click options right now.