Hector: Badge of Carnage – Review (PC, Mac, iOS)
| Game Name: | Hector: Badge of Carnage, Episodes 1-3 |
| Platforms: | PC, Mac, iOS |
| Publisher(s): | Telltale Games |
| Developer(s): | Straandlooper |
| Genre(s): | Adventure |
| Release Date: | Available Now |
| ESRB Rating: | Mature |
At first glance, Irish developer Straandlooper’s episodic adventure Hector: Badge of Carnage might be mistaken for a game from the mid-to-late ‘90s. It features almost all the stylistic and gameplay trappings of an old SCUMM engine LucasArts title: from the inventory system, to the surreal stream-of-consciousness puzzles, down to even the choice of font for displaying dialogue. Surprisingly, Hector started out on the iPhone back in June 2010, before Straandlooper teamed up with Telltale Games to publish the game more widely. Since the beginning of that partnership, Hector has been ported to the iPad, PC, and Mac. Considering its roots, it is very impressive how well it scales up.
The game’s protagonist – the crude, hard-living, misanthropic Inspector Hector – feels perfectly at home in the dilapidated, crime-ridden city of Clappers Wreake. It’s a filthy place in every sense of the word, but Hector wouldn’t have it any other way. Unfortunately for him, another resident of Clappers Wreake disagrees and decides to take extreme measures in an attempt to improve the town. This mysterious “philanthropist” holes up in the top floor of an apartment complex, starts sniping cops, and threatens to kill innocent hostages unless Hector agrees to fix the clock-tower, shut down the local porn store and help beautify the city park. Of course, after Hector spends the majority of the first episode fulfilling the madman’s requests, it turns out the demands are far from over, and the madman has much grander, more devious plans for Clappers Wreake. It’s up to Hector and his feeble but well-meaning partner Lambert to save the city at all costs, even if that means getting covered in raw sewage or drugging an entire restaurant full of people.
Hector is the very definition of a black comedy. Severe gallows humor, scatological jokes and profanity abound. In the opening cinematic of the first episode, for instance, the death of several civilians and police officers is casually played for laughs. This is immediately followed by a puzzle that involves going toilet-fishing with a used condom. It struck me as more depressing than amusing at first, but once I got into the correct cynical mindset, I started enjoying myself. The writing is undeniably good and there are genuine laugh-out-loud moments to be had, especially in episodes two and three, where the overarching story turns increasingly absurd. It doesn’t hurt that the voice acting, provided almost exclusively by the game’s producer Richard Morss, is uniformly excellent.
If you’ve ever played a comedic adventure game, you should feel right at home with Hector’s wacky puzzles. You’ll be stuffing a ludicrous assortment of oversized items (and sometimes even characters) into your infinite inventory. Then you’ll have to follow the game designers’ crazy leaps of logic as you attempt to figure out how to put all that junk to good use. Often you will combine seemingly useless items to make useful makeshift items. You’ll also spend quite a bit of time in dialogue trees, trying to trick or persuade characters to give up an item or perform a task for you – or to get them to tell you what they want in exchange.
On the PC and Mac, Hector plays exactly like a traditional point-and-click puzzler. However, it also works very well on an iPhone or iPad. Instead of hovering over items or points of interest with your mouse cursor, here you tap the screen once to examine something and twice to interact with it. Using or combining items is similarly intuitive: tap to select an item, then tap the thing you want to interact with. The only disadvantage to not having a cursor is that slowly dragging one’s finger across the screen to find interactive objects in the environment can be cumbersome. Here the game could have benefited from including the option to simply highlight all interactive objects, similar to how it was implemented in the last season of Sam & Max. While fans of pixel-hunting might object to this suggestion, this manner of simplification is important when adapting old-school game design to new input methods. All in all, I prefer the PC and Mac versions of the game, but the iOS versions are also completely functional and engaging to play.
Hector is not a particularly hard or long game. Each of the three episodes should take the average player about two hours to complete. On iOS, the game will run you $4.99 per episode for iPhone and 6.99 for iPad. You’ll get a similar deal on Steam and Telltale’s site, where the full series is sold for $19.99. Your own mileage may vary, but I think that’s a fine price point for what is essentially a very amusing, well-made 6-hour adventure game. The genre is going through a bit of a renaissance right now, but games like Hector: Badge of Carnage are still all too rare.
