The plot of The Drifter is a veritable corkboard of conspiracies—shadowy corporate payoffs, illicit experiments on the unhoused, and a rash of mysteriously convenient serial killings—that are practically connected by lines of red string, creating a complex web of information. At the center of it all is the unwitting Mick Carter, who’s spent years running from his past but soon finds himself running from cops and paramilitary goons.
It’s to the credit of the developers at Powerhoof that Mick’s misadventures retain a gripping momentum even in the typically laidback template of a sort of point-and-click adventure game. Much of this tension comes from the fact that the drifter can and will die upon being thrown into scenarios where he might end up shot, stabbed, or splattered across the pavement. Death, though, is just the beginning here, as time seems to rewind itself after each failure, letting Mick trial-and-error his way through one hopeless predicament after another.
For Mick, this revival process is one of horror and pain, feelings underscored by the Australian-accented growl of his omnipresent narration. In a practical sense, the voiceover adds further color to the game beyond the vibrant and detailed pixel art, but it hits particularly hard whenever Mick dies and, in a flash of excruciating white light, is put back together again. The Drifter turns a standard video game process—constant death and rebirth—into something grisly and undesirable, while raising salient, if somewhat underdeveloped, questions about how such abilities might shape a person’s outlook on reality.
With that said, it’s not all death all the time for Mick. There are still conventional adventure-game sequences of talking to other characters or lumbering through the environment, picking up objects meant to come in handy for a puzzle. These more low-key scenes are the best showcase for The Drifter’s optional, unique dual-stick control scheme, where a circle appears around Mick that’s populated by nodes corresponding to points of interest in his immediate vicinity. Using the left analog stick moves Mick while the right stick navigates the circle, and selecting a node that corresponds to a bookshelf will send him to search it for clues.
Alas, a controller isn’t particularly suited for The Drifter’s fast-paced moments, because it’s never clear what a node corresponds to at a glance. By contrast, pointing and clicking with the mouse provides an immediacy and ease of understanding that the dual-stick layout simply doesn’t replicate. And it’s fitting that the keyboard and mouse are still the best way to play the game, because it still falls victim to the usual hang-ups of a point-and-click adventure.
There are still a few moments where you’ll be at a complete loss for what to do, hoping to blunder into some inscrutable use for an item by selecting anything and everything in the environment. And these moments of stalled progress are particularly noticeable whenever Mick is in peril. The Drifter may turn his heat-of-the-moment failures into a central plot point, but they bog down the pacing just the same whenever you don’t know how to proceed.
What stumbles there are, though, do little to loosen The Drifter’s sturdy grasp of its chosen genre. With a steady stream of plot twists and storytelling intrigue, the game is a propulsive and polished example of the form, every bit the satisfying pulp adventure it sets out to be.
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