Journey of a
Roach
Daedalic Entertainment
It’s been a long time, too long
perhaps, since I could choose to be a roach (real life not included).
Bad Mojo remains the pinnacle (in a very small field) but some
interesting perspectives and roachy capabilities make this worth a look.
FYI, if you have never played
Bad Mojo you really really should. Nothing else like it. Play the redux
version and get down and grotty.
By comparison, this is clean and
neat and tidy. It’s also a whole lot shorter and a whole lot cuter.
Which wouldn’t be hard (the cuter bit).
A friend and a flower are the
driving impetuses in this post-apocalyptic world. True to form, the
roaches survived, and Jim will do his best to triumph. His best is
necessary, given the somewhat overly complicated obstacles in his way.
By which I mean the puzzles. Which probably need to be so, given the
length of the journey – 3 hours max probably, but easily less than 1 if
you know the “answers”.
It is quite charming, and those
roach capabilities I mentioned before make it a whole lot more
interesting than it might have been. Walls and ceilings are no obstacle
– just put the best of your 6 legs forward and up you go. The scene then
rotates so that the wall/ceiling/other wall is the floor, as least as
far as the perspective goes. Which as I intimated makes puzzle solving a
little more interesting, as the solution could well be (literally) above
you.
Find things, combine things,
pull things and walk up walls. Plus play some kinda mini-games that are
a lot more interesting and integrated than many games (the fly catching
is a case in point).
Jim doesn’t speak and nor does
anybody else. Or at least they don’t speak English. They chitter away in
much the same way as the Sims did/do (it never occurred to me that the
Sims spoke Roach) and little picture bubbles help the translation.
It isn’t a hard game, unless you
miss the item you need, but (and hands up if you have heard this/read
this here before) some tried and true do all sorts of everything
anywhere was required (the pop up picture hints notwithstanding). It
could of course just be my 52 year old overloaded adventure brain, but
that’s a call you will have to make yourself.
The music suits the feel, and if
this review is somewhat short, well that suits too.
A gentle, charming outing (and
who ever thought you could say that about a roach, even one called Jim).
Grade: B
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
