Milkmaid of
the Milky Way
Machineboy
Clearly made with love and
affection for the Sierra style point and click genre, Milkmaid didn’t
really do it for me, but did deliver a charming 3 hours or so of
adventuring.
The high points were the rhyming
dialogue and the musical score. The former, all read, was at times
clever, only occasionally a little forced, and never got tiresome. The
latter was generally delightful.
Ruth is the sole inhabitant of a
Norwegian farm in 1920. Tending the cows, the initial tasks are
farmingly mundane – milk cows, make butter and cheese, fix a few things.
Then the night comes, and all manner of strange begins. Suffice to say
that Ruth and the cows find themselves on a quest to thwart an
intergalactic youth stealing tyrant.
I said in my first look that
there were no visible hotspots, and no reactive cursers, making
exploring more of a challenge. Either the game was patched in the
meantime, or I failed to pay enough attention, because the small cross
hair cursor will pulse when you can interact with something. It may not
be other than an observation, as opposed to being an item you can take
or something you can interact with, but it separates the completely
inanimate items from the rest.
You will find items, and using
them involves dragging them from the inventory ribbon to where you want
to try. I have to say there are some silly solves (the frog stands out)
and some sequences near the end are overly complicated and convoluted.
Many though are not like that, and make sense in the overall context.
Milkmaid is probably more
pixelly (by which I mean that there is a lack of fine detail) than many
of these retro-style games, but the chalky looking backgrounds provide a
contrast that brings things together into an appealing whole.
You can talk to other
characters, and at times you have conversational choices which don’t
seem to make much difference to what occurs, but provide a level of
participation that would otherwise be missing. You can also try
different actions at certain times which again don’t make any
difference, but which are necessary in order to advance.
You can save at will, and while
some sequences require a level of timing, these parts are generally
fairly gentle and a few attempts should see you move on. The end
suggests Ruth might be back, and good on her.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
Video card: AMD Radeon
RX 470 8192MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
February 2017
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