“A classic film noir type adventure game with dark humour, adult themes and very, very dangerous animals.
“Sonny Featherland and Marty McChicken were once legendary detective partners, but time had passed them by. Sonny is a burnt-out, alcoholic ex-cop, who spends his days in an abandoned hotel, while Marty hides behind the facade of a star-detective, but slowly he’s losing himself. Now they’re back together again on a case bigger and much more dangerous than anything they’ve ever encountered before.”
I received a key for this from the developer and although visual novel/point-and-click stuff isn’t really my thing I decided to give it a whirl because the premise of chickens as police is pretty interesting to me.
I wasn’t planning to play much but I did get a bit sucked into the story and ended up going through the first chapter which took about four hours. There are four chapters I think and I’m a bit of a slowpoke, partially because I lost like 20 minutes trying to get a high score in the target practice minigame. The game feels quite polished mostly because of the art and voice acting (which is almost always great) but I also didn’t really encounter any bugs, except one time I did things out of order and the characters talked about visiting a place they had already been (maybe they were trying to block out the body they had just found).
The questioning/interrogating of characters is probably my favourite bit (choosing the right dialogue options based on your updating knowledge of their personality) especially because I’m not sure what happens if you completely screw it up and getting the “True Detective” stamp at the end is a super satisfying relief after previous anxiety.
The game is mostly about visiting locations, talking to characters, and trying to learn who you can trust while unraveling the mystery. It feels like there might be a lot of depth to the characters, but I’m not far enough in to make a determination on that. The writing overall seems good and the dialogue is pretty decent I think although it misses the mark a couple of times for me as I’m not super into noir.
I’m not sure if I will continue, although I really want to meet Miranda the giraffe, but that’s definitely mostly a factor of the visualnovelness (it’s not a hard-core one but I’m severely lacking in patience at the moment), so if that’s your jam it’s definitely a game to look into.
Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Release: November 5, 2020