This one's going to be really easy. There are no surprises here. Dark Rites of Arkham is exactly what it says it's going to be.
The store page on Steam, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't offer a neat one-line description I can cut-and-paste here, opting instead for a full feature list, but I can tell you it's a retro-noir, pixel graphic point and click adventure set in 1930s Arkham, New York against a backdrop of Lovecraftian horror. The protagonist is a hard-boiled detective and the crime he's investigating is a ritual murder. With that, everyone knows where they are and what to expect and the demo carries through on every one of those expectations.
Honestly, I could pretty much stop there. If you've ever played one of these games, all you'll need to know is that this is another of them. I'll say up front that it's a good one, too. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. And if it isn't, it's not going to change your mind.
I suppose I should go into it all in a bit more detail, all the same. Wouldn't be much of a review otherwise. Or much of a blog post.
Let me begin with the graphics, then. They're excellent, as I think you'll be able to see from the screenshots. Over the last few years I have completely changed my opinion on retro pixel graphics. I used to dislike it but now I'm quite fond of it. I'm sure if you dig hard enough through my posts here, you'd be able to find more than one negative comment regarding the style but I think you'd have to go back quite a long way.
Like a lot of things, I think it's an acquired taste. Most people who appreciate it now acquired their taste for it in their childhood. I didn't. There were no pixels when I was a child.
By the time I saw graphics like these, I was already middle-aged. I didn't like them then and I don't much like those old, original versions now. That's why, for a while, I thought I didn't like the modern take on the style, either.
Retro pixel graphics, though, don't really look that much like the ones I remember from thirty years ago. They're much more nuanced and subtle and there always seems to be a wealth of detail I can't remember noticing when the originals were around. I suspect that has far more to do with the graphic capabilities of the machines I play them on now, and especially the monitors, than anything about the art itself. I would have been playing the old pixel adventure games on a 14" CRT display at 640x480. It's no wonder I could hardly tell what I was looking at, half the time.
So, DRoA looks good. That's a start. How does it read? After all, reading the words is every bit as important as looking at the pictures in a point and click adventure.
It is all reading, too. There's no voice acting, just a rather pleasant period jazz soundtrack. The text, which displays quickly and legibly across the screen, reads very well. The writing is solid, which is just as well because the game opens with a fairly long dialog sequence, during which the detective (Jack Foster.) spars with the landlord of a tenement apartment house over access to a room a crime suspect is renting.
This requires no input from the player whatsoever beyond pressing a key to keep the conversation moving. It could very easily have felt frustrating as an opening, were it not for the quality of that dialog, which zips along in a lively, pulp-noir style.
The writing may be retro but it's certainly not old-fashioned. No genuine thirties pulp would have dared to be as sweary as this. In that sense - and probably that sense alone - it feels extremely modern. I mean, it really is very sweary indeed. Not quite Roy Kent in Ted Lasso sweary but getting there.
The setting is unrelentingly grim, as you'd expect, but the tone is deftly humorous. Black humor, that is. There's no attempt at Chandleresque pastiche, thankfully. I've seen enough of that to last me more than a lifetime. Instead, the prose style remains grounded without ever feeling leaden. It keeps a nice balance between the unpleasantness of what's happening and the matter-of-fact reaction of the seasoned professionals who have to deal with it. Except for the rookie who throws up when he sees his first decapitated corpse, of course. That's a given.
What about the plot? Too early to say. The demo, which took me a shade under half an hour to finish, doesn't really get far enough into the story to give much away. In fact, I know little more, having played through it, than I could have figured out from the title. We're in Arkham and there's been a ritual murder. That's it. Still, enough for a demo.
Okay, then. The demo looks good, reads well, hits the right tone and introduces its theme and plot effectively. That just leaves the gameplay. How's that?
Again, solid. Maybe better than that makes it sound. It's not innovative, original or exceptional but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be effective and familiar for what the game is aiming to be. Who wants innovation or originality in a retro-noir point and click adventure, anyway? Not me and, I'd guess, very few of the players who are going to be interested enough in the game to download the demo, either.
In contrast to several of the demos I've reviewed so far, no-one at the deliciously-named studio behind the game, Postmodern Adventures, is attempting any wheel re-invention. The controls are just what you expect them to be and the UI is minimalistic in a very unflashy fashion. At no point did I have to delve into any settings to find out what something did or how to do anything I wanted to do. It all just worked as should.
With the controls safely under control and out of mind, I was able to address the puzzles with full concentration. There weren't many but I'm pleased to be able to say I figured all of them out on my own, without recourse to external guides or hints. One or two took me a moment but that was only because I hadn't passed the mouse pointer over the appropriate part of the screen yet.
Better still, the solutions were all logical. Not reasonable - that would be asking too much of any adventure game - but at least they made sense.If you're a policeman with a gun, why wouldn't you shoot the lock off a door? In fact, the solutions were so logical, I think all of them were the first ideas I came up with, which really is unusual.
Working through the various obstacles standing in the way of investigating the case was good fun and also satisfying. I figured out what to do each time well before frustration or boredom began to leech the fun out of it and you can't really ask for more from a point and click adventure.
The demo ends when you've discovered the body and used your notebook to recorded what little evidence there is. Then comes a slide show of images from later in the game, just to give you some idea what comes next. That was a nice touch.
It's a good demo. It's an odds-on bet that if you enjoy it you'll enjoy the full game, so you might as well wish-list it. I have.
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