Point-and-click adventure games weren’t just formative to Tadej Gregorcic’s taste as a player, they were fundamental to his understanding of the English language. Growing up in Slovenia in the ’80s and ’90s, games weren’t easily available for purchase. Somehow, Gregorcic’s father got his hands on classic titles like Police Quest and Space Quest. Those parser-based games required the player to actually type in commands for their on-screen avatars to follow.
“One of the games my dad brought me was Leisure Suit Larry,” Grecorcic says. “I was a kid, maybe eight years old, and [there were] very inappropriate things I had to learn how to type. So, very formative.”
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Building On A Classic Foundation
Decades later, that love of old-school adventure games lives on in Elroy and the Aliens, for which Gregorcic serves as game director, lead writer, and designer. I went hands-on with the first game from developer Motiviti at the European Games Showcase during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, and came away impressed with its execution of the style of design pioneered by those classic games.
In Elroy and the Aliens, you can expect to do the traditional point-and-click activities. You click around the screen to make your character, fledgling rocket engineer Elroy, walk around his house. He picks up objects, like a can of rocket fuel, and twiddles around in his inventory to combine the can with a nozzle. Now you can fuel up your rocket. There are puzzles to solve, including a pretty cool one involving a unique locking mechanism on the gate to a junkyard. And there are plenty of colorful characters to chat up.
Elroy and the Aliens may be traditional in gameplay, but it stands out thanks to its hand-drawn Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic, vividly intelligent writing, and interesting settings (and I’m still, a ways away from meeting the aliens mentioned in the title).
For example, Elroy’s next door neighbor, Mrs. Kandinsky, has the voice and cough of a chainsmoker — and she is — but insists that she’s “never buying another pack again.” The catch is that, for years, she worked for an airline and still has 73 duty-free cartons to work through. Elroy’s other neighbor is a hair salon. We don’t go inside the business, but we do get a line about how they still owe him a free haircut after he fixed their helmet dryer last week.
Telling Players Just Enough
I loved how lived-in these lines made the world feel, and Gregorcic says that writing the game has been a process of paring back, then adding, then paring back again. It’s about testing to see how much signposting players will tolerate and how little they can handle.
“In general, [you] try to not over explain and there’s a lot of things that got cut,” Gregorcic says. “Dialogue would be 20 lines, but you cut it to ten lines. Instead of somebody saying how they feel, it’s just being silent or changing their facial expression or something like that. I think that’s much more powerful.”
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These lines aren’t the point of the game. The main plot is about Elroy and a reporter, Peggie, heading to space to find his missing father. I’m willing to trust that Motiviti will deliver on that main plot because the characterization feels so specific.
Games like The Case of the Golden Idol and Unavowed have moved the point-and-click in innovative new directions, but there’s room for Motiviti’s take, too. Motiviti isn’t reinventing the wheel, but when there aren’t very many wheels getting made, it’s nice to have a wheel that does what you want. .
Elroy and the Aliens is out on Steam today.
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