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Iris has a mystery to solve. Her brother is missing and there's no one better suited to solve the case than her: a brusque, gimlet-eyed journalist straight out of a hard-boiled detective novel. She is the star of Phoenix Springsa new game with a surprisingly original visual style that looks like it was screen-printed directly onto your TV.
Iris follows her brother to a college campus where he once worked, and from there the trail gets complicated. You must examine a specific detail of a picture on the wall, inspect meticulously alphabetically arranged shelves, then double-click on an innocuous spotlight to progress. In short, stunning graphics, crisp writing, and frustratingly oblique puzzles: all the hallmarks of a point-and-click adventure game.
Such conventions may seem anachronistic to gamers today, but for a decade beginning in the late 1980s, adventure titles were among the hottest in gaming, offering scenarios of sophisticated sophistication. unprecedented. Although they lacked combat, bosses, or leveling, they entertained with sharp writing, often in an absurdist comedic mode, and puzzles that ranged in difficulty from mild to incredibly obtuse.
Two companies defined the golden age of adventure games: Sierra, founded by husband-and-wife duo Ken and Roberta Williams, and LucasArts, a spin-off of George Lucas' film studio. Sierra laid the groundwork for the genre with 1984's The King's Questbut it was 1987 from LucasArts Manic Mansion who showed his imaginative potential. Over the next decade, games like the beloved Monkey Island Series began incorporating music and detailed environments that made their worlds even more immersive and accessible. Their stories were mostly told with a light-hearted wit, although in the 1990s more mature titles appeared, such as the dystopian Under a steel sky and the mysterious island adventure Mysterywhich sold 6 million copies.
In the mid-1990s, gaming technology was evolving. Early first-person shooters and action games were coming out with rudimentary 3D graphics, and adventure games, with their pixel art, gentle pacing, and lack of multiplayer, were starting to look dated. Sierra was bought out and its original studios closed. Although LucasArts released a glorious swan song in one of its latest games, Sinister Fandangoa journey into Mexican folklore, the writing was on the wall for adventure games. In 2005, even Monkey Island Creator Ron Gilbert found it impossible to pitch new adventure games to publishers, saying: “You'll get a better reaction by announcing that you have the plague.” »
However, almost two decades later, the genre is making an unexpected comeback. This is partly due to the nostalgia of older fans, who have poured millions of dollars into crowdfunding campaigns for new adventure games created by the old guard. Gilbert makes a comeback with Thimbleweed Park and a Return to Monkey Island which lived up to the charm of the original.
But a younger generation of developers also recognized the format's potential in terms of narrative ambition. In THE sexy brutal you explore a mansion stuck in a deadly time loop, while Penment is a monastic mystery from the 16th century. Are particularly impressive Norco And Kentucky Route Zerotwo games that boast literary-caliber writing and cleverly blend science fiction and magical realism to deliver razor-sharp social commentary.
In the case of Phoenix Springsdeveloper Calligram Studio has made smart choices about where to innovate with point-and-click and where to stick with tradition. Like the classics of the early 90s, here is a game that allows you to advance at your own pace and trust your intelligence to find the answers to its puzzles. This also assumes that players will enjoy carefully scouring its environments for clues – which is indeed a pleasure, given that this is one of the most visually arresting games in recent memory.
There are some aspects that deviate from the familiar LucasArts mold, however. For one thing, there are no items in this game; instead, you collect ideas, mental clues gleaned from observation and conversation that you combine to advance your quest. It also departs from the verbosity typical of the genre with a laconic economy of language reminiscent of film noir.
As the game progresses and you reach the titular desert oasis, the story's grip on reality begins to loosen and you begin to wonder if your protagonist is who she claims to be , or if all this is real.
Beyond the mechanical changes made to the formula, the most provocative gesture Phoenix Springs is to remain allusive in its responses, letting its questions about bioethics and social collapse linger in your mind long after the game is over. In small gestures, it shows how this beloved genre was able to evolve. But in the conventions he upholds, he also proves that those old bones are still good, even after all this time.
