Hector: Badge of Carnage Episode 1 was released today for PC and Mac.
This first installment, We Negotiate with Terrorists, is the first in a trilogy of games developed by Straandlooper and published by Telltale Games. While technically considered a point-and-click adventure, Hector plays more like a puzzle game – one definitely not suitable for work.
Story
Hector takes places in Clappers Wreak, the fictitious crime capital of Great Britain. Players take on the role of Detective Inspector Hector, the titular drunk and ornery protagonist. He wakes up one morning to find Clappers Wreak in the grips of a hostage situation, and the remaining members of the police force have already been executed by a lone gunman. While not exactly anyone’s first choice, Hector is left as the sole officer to take care of the problem. Though he looks incompetent, Hector steps up to the challenge with a less-than-eager attitude and a barely sober demeanor.
Gameplay
Players advance through Hector using a carefully balanced method of social engineering and MacGyver-esque tactics . You find objects and have to deduce how they might be combined or used on the environment, culminating in a Rube Goldberg series of solutions. In one instance, you have to combine a shoelace and a condom to form a net, allowing you to fish a paperclip out of a toilet and use it to pick the lock of the cell in which Hector inexplicably awakened.
It’s less straightforward than it sounds. But the value of the game lies in its innocuously misleading puzzles – and if you get stuck, the game features both a hint system and a built-in walkthrough that’ll tell you step-by-step what to do.
Graphics
While Hector: Badge of Carnage might not win any awards for its stunning visual effects, the 2D animation has its own thematic charm. The cartoony graphics complement the punchy style and crude elements of the game. Similar in appearance to the graphics in On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (that Penny Arcade game that flew under everyone’s radar a few years back), Hector also shares Penny Arcade’s self-deprecating humor.
Audio
The outlandish characters in Hector are exacerbated by the ridiculous voice acting and over-the-top sound effects. In the opening scene of the game, if you direct Hector to use the toilet in his cell, the stream of urine coursing into the basin is interrupted only by Hector’s sarcastic complaints.
Overall
Hector is a one-of-a-kind puzzle adventure. At some times it made me feel intellectually stimulated, and at others it made me feel like an idiot for not immediately realizing that sometimes you just have to request a certain song played by a lone bass drummer in order to get him to sell you an illegal knockoff designer handbag, so you can spray paint it red and pose as a drug dealer.
I mean, really. A child could have gotten that right away.
Although the game is only about three hours long, it’s completely worth the $9.99 pricetag. It provides a few solid hours of entertainment followed by a cliffhanger in the story, leaving you dying for the next installment.