Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
BROK the InvestiGator gets straight to the point: you start the game in a room on fire. Naturally, you start pointing and clicking to solve a simple puzzle. This leads to another riddle: Alligator PI Brok urgently exclaims, “I have to get through that door!” Before your gray matter gears begin to roar, a dialog prompts you to press “X” to activate action mode. With a little Double Dragon style, or should we say Double Crocodile-style! – crushing the buttons, the door puzzle is “solved”. So the Cowcat Games cards go straight to the table: Brok the InvestiGator is a point-and-click game, but sometimes you just tear things to pieces. But does he have a trick up his sleeve?
Brok is the second game developed and self-published by independent store Cowcat Games. The first was Demetrios, another point-and-click adventure, first released six years earlier in 2016, which will come to Switch in 2018. Based in a small town in the south of France, the company is a one-stop-shop operation , making that second game under his belt even more impressive.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
The game tells the story of its alligator protagonist P.I., his teenage cat stepson Graff, and various other associated animals. It’s set in a dystopian future, where the “slumers” are second-class citizens, banished to live in the rubble of ancient cities, while the “drummers” are a select few, living in a pristine bubble guarded by robots. . Wracked with guilt after a traumatic event, Brok tries to get his life back on track while raising Graff. Graff navigates his adolescence and his school exams which could earn him the status of “drummer”. Beginning, like so many good detective stories, with a mysterious phone call, Brok takes on a case that leads to the revelation of something much bigger.
The first puzzles are quite superficial, to say the least. Some of the game’s objects, like a remote control that works with cameras or a device that detects “good intentions,” seem so contrived that they might as well be called things like “Puzzle Number 14 Solution” or “Opener for that carries in particular”. However, it gets better as the game progresses.
A puzzle sequence that takes place in a holding cell is almost like Day of the Tentacle. We were reminded to discover and manipulate the quirks of Edison’s house and its inhabitants, just on a smaller scale. There’s something inherently fun about learning characters’ behavior patterns and then treating them like cogs in a puzzle machine, having them repeat their actions endlessly until you deciphered them. Here, the prison guard’s necessarily infinite patience in the matter, while his own prisoner repeatedly wastes his time, is hilarious.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
In the same scene, there is another similarity to Day of the Tentacle: you can control multiple characters and switch between them. Unlike the 90s LucasArts classic, however, this isn’t used for puzzle design. In our game, we fully solved the chapter side of Brok’s stepson, Graff, without playing the role of Brok at all. The split character stages only provide a scene change if you get stuck, rather than a kind of four-dimensional Tetris.
Speaking of getting stuck, Brok’s hint system is pretty unusual. Direct text suggestions can be given out via the in-game menu: things like “Talk to such-and-such” or “Return to such-and-such a place”. However, these clues only come at the cost of an “ad”, a small collectible advertising flyer hidden somewhere in the game world. Collecting these ads requires close scrutiny and interaction, making it makes a traceable achievement in its own right. In theory, you could solve a puzzle on your own. as a side effect looking for an ad for a clue. In practice, though, we’ve always had a lot of announcements, so as a hint system it’s not the most elegant, but it does work as a replayability boost. Much like the game itself, it mixes two things that don’t necessarily relate to each other very intuitively, but end up being fun.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Offline)
The writing is a bit bland at first. Perhaps because of the English translation, it lacks an advantage, much like the overly serious characters at the start of the game. However, despite some correction errors in the on-screen text, it finds its place. At times the game veers into visual novel territory, with long conversations between characters with on-screen portraits and even the ability to piece together clues in a way reminiscent of Ace Attorney or Hercule Poirot: The First Cases. It took us a while to get used to the characters enough to handle the longer conversation sections, but when the writing is shorter and serves the game, it’s at least fully functional.
An impressive feat is the implementation of different routes through the game. Many puzzles have multiple solutions, usually characterized by thinking or combat, but these are expressed in the decisions of the characters. This seems important if you decide to resist taunts from a school bully or keep your impulsiveness from getting the better of you.
And sometimes there are consequences to taking a heavy-handed approach that are more than superficial. When we missed our son’s science fair because we got thrown in jail for beating up too many robots, our hearts sank. Too often, forking the paths of history can simply be an administrative burden of trying to mark all the paths that history could have followed. Here it feels mysterious without being obtuse, and it’s what ultimately made us care about the characters, albeit a few hours into the game.
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Connected)
Until now, the combination of branching paths and fistfights in a point-and-click adventure has been timelessly associated with the bleepy-bloopy skirmishes and keyboard-and-mouse noise of the 1992 LucasArts title. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It’s fair to say that 30 years later, Cowcat Games has found a better way to hit that particular niche combo.
conclusion
Brok the Investigator is a true original. It’s a hodgepodge of point-and-click, side-scrolling beat ’em-up, visual novel, and find the object. Most of the time, these disparate ideas feel a little clunky next to each other, but despite a slow start, we finally felt a little spark and it all became more than the sum of its parts. It’s all the more impressive considering it’s only the second game from a one-man studio. Point-and-click adventure fans should carefully consider pointing and clicking on your wishlist, or just hitting the buy button.