On the contrary, I ended up rushing through this mind-wreckingly interesting game world, and blasting through its chunks of story too quickly, because I just wanted to be done with the fetching and carrying of objects. Well, maybe I’m just particularly uptight, but that never works for me. And OK, you might argue that these convolutions don’t just slow down the story for the sake of it - they encourage you to spend time exploring the world, getting lost in its details, and then happily stumbling upon the widget-nozzle you needed for the nozzle-free widget two doors down. To me, it’s like being stopped every few minutes through a film I’m enjoying, and forced to rummage around a dark room for some meaningless household object, that happens to be the only thing that isn’t inexplicably superglued to the surface it’s resting on. The rope is the story, and the knots are the business of arbitrarily seeking out items, that must be unpicked before you can progress. No matter how interesting its environment (and good lord, I can’t wait to be done moaning so I can talk about how interesting it is), Off-Peak’s world is topologically identical to a rope with knots tied along its length. And however much you dress it up, that’s what point and clicks, and the first-person walkabouts that have evolved from them, will always boil down to. I still don’t like games about searching fruitlessly for door keys, cos I do enough of it in real life. And if you can’t already tell by how heavily I’ve set this up, I ended up loving it.
I knew I was going to hate it, not because it was going to be bad, but because it was going to expose me for the idiot I was. Our Adam Smith described Off-Peak’s predecessor, The Norwood Suite, as being about discovering the secrets behind a hotel, but really being about “learning about music and the creative process”. Added to that, I’ve got an abiding fear of being outed as intellectually inferior, and nothing makes that anxiety tingle like high-brow stories about music, a subject that makes me feel like a complete, trudging dunce.Īnd here was this first-person point and click game, set in an intellectually formidable surrealist landscape, about stealing a famous jazzman’s saxophone and getting sucked into a shadowy world where all was not as it seemed. A lot of adventure games just ain’t for me, because I’m a brute and a philistine. For whatever reason, my brain has barely any appetite for unlocking locked doors, solving mysteries, unravelling conspiracies or piecing together intricately implied backstories. So, let’s be real up front: I was dreading playing Tales From Off-Peak City Volume 1. Price: Available for all Humble Choice subscribers.
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