Update One Hundred and Fifty-Seven: 19 April 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

A Golden Wake is part of the stable of point and click adventure games made in Adventure Game Studio published by Wadjet Eye. I’m usually a big fan of Wadjet Eye-published games, and the smaller developers that develop for them. There’s a level of consistent quality in them… that unfortunately this game stays near the bottom of.

To start off - the game is on the older side, sure, but its native resolution is that of a postage stamp - not bigger than 200x300. It makes my monitor swamp the tiny, tiny window, and makes reading any text a painful undertaking. Some things I ended up having to click on were barely a few pixels large. The cramped window and how it flattened and simplified the art style all served to make this the least pleasant to look at point and click I’ve played.

The story isn’t much better - it’s disjointed and uninspired, without a strong throughline. Alfie Banks starts in real estate, in the 1920s… doesn’t super succeed in real estate… joins the mob… leaves the mob… there’s no heart under the skin, just ‘look at these facts about 1920s Miami!’. The usual stable of Wadjet Eye voice actors are in full force, though they’re not particularly well directed here.

One thing the game does different in a good way is a ‘Persuasion’ mini-game, like the interrogation mechanic in L.A. Noire but micro-pixellated, down to ‘watch their eyebrows rise to see if you’re saying the right thing!’ It was fun, and different from usual point and click adventure games. It was a good way to marry story and mechanics - of course a smooth-talking real estate salesman is going to solve problems by talking at them!

Wait one more thing I’m petty-mad about. It’s spoilers so one of my FAVORITE things is having the last words of a piece of work be the title of that piece of work. When it works right, it feels like a cosmic slam dunk. This game tries it, and it goes over like a lead balloon. It just irked me!

Beyond that, it’s very… meh. I missed an achievement by accident, and have one more achievement to get by listening to the developer’s commentary. I’ll get those another time, so I’ll come back to this game another day!

Speaking of, I added a new rule to myself: If I add a game on my ‘to revisit’ list, then the next game I play must be from that list.

Next up: So, that means -

See you soon!