Viktor: A Steampunk Adventure
Studio
Spektar
In a word, demented raucousness.
Viktor is a boar, who had a
“turbulent youth full of adventure, fear, several strong blows to the
head and a short prison sentence”. When we meet him he has just been
sacked from his street sweeping job in the Austria-Hungary Empire, so
being mildly megalomaniacal, he decides to respond by becoming Emperor.
But before the conquering can begin, it’s home for a bath. As you do.
The look may well be the first
thing that grabs you, and if it doesn’t appeal I don’t think anything
that comes after it will. If it does, you will likely remain entertained
throughout. The style captures the quirkiness, the awkwardness, and the
occasional incorrectness of Viktor and his quest. I won’t try and
describe it, just go look at it.
The next thing you will likely
notice is the dialogue, which in Viktor’s case is grunted, guttural,
gibberish. Marvin by comparison is still unintelligible, but almost
liltingly sing songs his dialogue, courtesy of a hookah induced psychic
high. No one is sensical, at least to the ear, but many sound as you
might expect them to. Gibberish is as gibberish is spoken, with speech
bubbles and dialogue trees providing the translation. It so very suits
everything else.
Then you get the map. It’s on
the wall in Viktor’s flat and don’t fail to examine it. Not only is it
worth the price of admission by itself, full of satirical and irreverent
descriptions of the various countries, it will likely cement whether
this really is a game for you. I of course had to look first at the
upside down “other unwanted
kingdom“, and then worked my way round the rest of the world. I chortled
and grimaced in equal doses.
As I did throughout the game.
Viktor can be politically incorrect, rude, gruff and belligerent, but so
can much satire and even more humour, and it tickled my funny bits. It
wasn’t the staple diet, but it was prevalent. I confess I looked forward
to the next conversation.
Before we go much further, there
are also mini-games. The first almost saw me throw Viktor from the
dirigible, but I triumphed eventually, and the rest were reasonably
benign by comparison. Except for my doh! experience at the shooting
gallery. And I confess to rather enjoying the dig-a-mole tunnel/maze to
break into the bank, despite my usual antipathy to mazey type things. I
didn’t find the devil though.
Kudos to Viktor though, as there
are ways round some of these if you have the right things or perhaps
have had the right conversation. The same applies to some other solves.
I can’t tell you how many, because I solved the puzzles my way, not
another way, but I am aware they exist. The slider is one I did in a way
other than the obvious.
To achieve his end, Viktor has
to travel throughout Europe, and a few other places, interacting with a
range of real and not so real personages. The former include H.G. Wells,
Nikola Tesla and Franz Kafka, the latter Dr. Frankenstein, Matilda the
anarchist love interest zebra and the aforementioned Marvin the owl. Who
also likes baths.
Apart from the mini-games,
puzzling is largely a mix of inventory based bewilderments and dialogue
conundrums. I did think that rather a lot of the inventory requirements
were somewhat opaque, but Marvin offered help at times, through the
tried and true quiz show element of phoning a friend, and I phoned him a
lot (I even got a Steam achievement for doing so). He wasn’t always
helpful, given his state of being, but he was generally worth the call
in any event.
Viktor is exclusively point and
click. Click on something of interest, and four action items will
generally be available – use, talk, take, or kick. Viktor is a boar
after my own heart, and stomping/kicking is necessary for some things,
but always for relieving the tension. The suitcase bottom right is the
inventory, the gramophone bottom left the menu. The gramophone shape is
deliberate, and another nice feature. Throughout the game you can find
records (those old vinyl things which can sound so much better than cd’s)
which enable you to switch the accompanying sound track. I found about 8
but apparently there are 18. The menu also allows you to change the
wallpaper outside the game window, and you save, load and exit from
there as well.
About half way through you get
the option to switch at will between Viktor and Matilda. I am not sure
how much can be done by the other, but some tasks require each to do
their part. I do know Matilda can’t use the phone, for very sound
reasons.
Four to five hours later, after
making a few laws and putting a few things right, the game ends with
Viktor going off to repel the Romans. Here’s hoping we get to go along.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
Video card: AMD
Radeon RX 470 8192MB
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April 2017
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