Next Fest - What's A Little "C" Among Friends?

• Excuses for not writing the post I was planning to write #347: 

Six vans from the National Grid turned up outside our house this morning and a dozen workmen got out and started digging up the street so they could fix two faults in the electricity supply. Consequently, we had no power from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon. And the dog ate my homework.

Before that happened, I had time to play the Next Fest demo I was most lookiing forward to, the one for Nighthawks, which I've had wish-listed for years. I was going to talk about that and also the other demo I've finished, A Tale of Dirty Whiskers, but Nighthawks, even the demo, deserves a lot more time than I have left to give it today, so this is just going to be a quick run through the cat game.

Attentive readers (There must be one or two.) will remember I said part of the reason I chose this demo was that it was voiced in Spanish and I thought it might give me a free language lesson. 

Guess what? It's not in Spanish. 

It's in Portuguese. I do know the difference, having been to both countries many times. I've always thought spoken Portuguese sounds very little like Spanish, unlike written Portuguese, which looks very much like Spanish indeed. I'm kinda surprised I mistook one for the other, even in the short clip I watched. I must be losing my ear after all this time not traveling.

It's a moot point anyway, because the game is voiced in neither. Well, it might be if you selected the "Portuguese" option at the start but since there's an "English" option and I have no interest in practicing my non-existent Portuguese, that's what I picked.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well deal with the translation up front. It's not great. It's not terrible but it's a long way from idiomatic and has some fairly unmistakeable errors. I was particularly confused by the way the player-character is consistently shown as "Detetive" in dialog scenes although when any of the other characters refer to him they use the word "Detective". 

I wondered for a while if Detetive was actually his name and it was some kind of post-modernist joke but I checked and "detetive" is indeed Portuguese for "detective", so I'm guessing it's just an error. Translation is clearly still a work in progress anyway. Whole passages of dialog are still in Portuguese in the supposedly English version.

It's all perfectly understandable (Well, the translated bits. The untranslated Portuguese maybe not so much...) so it didn't get in the way of the game for me. Not that there is much of a game in the demo. The Steam Store page doesn't really claim a genre for A Tale of Dirty Whiskers but I was expecting some kind of adventure-murder-mystery-detection-point-and-click affair. Instead, I think it might be more accurate to call it a Visual Novel because there's very little for the player to do except turn the virtual pages.

It opens with a seven minute sequence that requires no input from the player at all and the entire demo only took me tem more minutes to complete, during which I did very little more. Mostly what I did was watch a bunch of odd-looking but nicely-drawn cat-people insult me and make snarky remarks about each other. It was quite entertaining.

The plot involves a family of cats whose mother has just died in what may or may not be suspicious circumstances. One of the family has hired a detective to investigate. That's you. 

The cat that hired you didn't bother to tell their siblings you were coming, on the very valid grounds that if they had, most of them wouldn't have turned up for the big family get-together. Consequently, none of them is very favorably disposed to talk to you, although they certainly are happy enough to talk in front of you.

Listening to them doing that is most of the demo. The rest is a bit of prowling around after they've gone to bed, looking for clues in traditional adventure game style. Except you don't actually move around the house as such. You just stand there and click some menu options. By co-incidence, this also turns out to be how Nighthawks handles the same process, although that's a bit like saying a butcher's bike is the same as a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.  

The cats themselves are all very distinctive individuals, fun to look at and listen to. They look nothing like each other, which is explained by the possibility that their mother may have had many lovers. I did think that went a little further toward the "cat" end of the spectrum than anthropomorphised cat-people games usually tavel.

One of the siblings is a loud-mouthed drunk, albeit good-natured with it. One is some sort of goth-punk-emo teenager or twentysomething. Another is a dandy and there's a tough-but-maternal-looking one. The worried-looking, apparently well-balanced cat is the one that hired you. Oh, amd there's a cute kitten, too. Well, the game tells you he's cute. I wasn't convinced.  

In the seventeen minutes the demo gave me to do it, I didn't form much more of an impression about any of them than that but according to the description on the store page all eight of them are "deep and flawed". (Not the kitten.) Also, I don't believe I met all eight, although I could be wrong.

The whole thing feels a little ramshackle but not in a bad way. I wouldn't buy it but if I got it as part of a Prime Gaming offer I'd claim it and I'd probably end up playing it and enjoying it. The illustrations are charming and, if you allow for the shaky translation, the writing isn't bad, either.

I haven't wish-listed it but that's not really a mark against it. If you like quirky cat games, it'd definitely be worth taking a look at the demo. It won't take up much of your time.