In the golden age of point and click adventures, LucasArts was king of the mountain. You could tell it was a LucasArts game just by the art style. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug!

Puzzle games and adventure games are similar, think Golden Idol for a minute. The difference is failure state. You can, and will die in an adventure game, forcing a restart at some key point. Sierra had notoriously bad failure states where you would have to reset to hours prior. Thankfully we’ve learned a lot of lessons on that front, and games today have you lose a few minutes at most.

The Drifter has all these modern mechanics and trappings, wrapped in a deliciously voice-acted sci-fi story. From the first act, you are slipping between reality and nightmares, trying to find some sense. With 9 total acts to get through, and quite a few puzzles along the way, it’s a solid journey from start to finish. As with many of these games, the logic in some of the puzzles can breakdown if you’re not paying attention… but at no point did I think that a solution was completely bonkers.

The pacing is such that you can either dig through the whole thing in a single sitting, or take 1 chapter at a time. There’s no timer, and the act of gradually unveiling the mystery is quite fun. Thankfully, the twists themselves are also super logical, so no real deus ex machina here.

Give it a shot, well worth your time and money. Can certainly use more games like this in the future!