The Drifter is a point-and-click adventure that's also a fast-paced thriller

When you think "point-and-click adventure" you probably think of something a bit sedate, something you play with a hot drink near at hand while taking plenty of pauses to mull over what you're going to do next. The Drifter is not that kind of adventure game.

It's the work of Powerhoof, an Australia studio you may know from local multiplayer games like Crawl or Regular Human Basketball, but who've quietly been releasing classic-style adventure games on the side for free, including Sierra-esque quest fantasy The Telwynium and Antarctic research-base horror game Peridium.

"I've always done adventure games," says Dave Lloyd, the programmer/designer half of Powerhoof. "The first game I ever did was an adventure game, like 20 years ago when I found Adventure Game Studio, which is really what got me into making games." Peridium, made for a game jam, featured a sequence where the protagonist was being hanged by the neck from an extension lead, and had to use a pair of wirecutters to cut themselves free. Lloyd watched players frantically fumble through the simple action of clicking one thing and then another, panicking the whole time, and had an idea.

"That was the first inkling I got that you could make a point-and-click adventure that's a bit fast-paced and has that heart-thumping kind of feeling like you're up to phase three of a boss battle, which you don't expect to have in an adventure game," he says. "That became one of the core pillars of The Drifter: how do we get these really fast-paced-feeling elements into what's usually a slow-paced genre?"

Two homeless men talk by a burning bin — (Image credit: Powerhoof)

That's not all there is to The Drifter, though. In between the demo's pulse-pounders you can have a long conversation with a friendly man by a burning bin, and walk back and forth between a few screens as you collect the information and tools you need to solve a classic multi-step 'repair the thing' puzzle. "There's some sections in the game where there's a lot more locations you'll be wandering around as you try to piece things together," Lloyd says, "but then it goes back to really fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat kind of stuff. Trying to balance that is a big part of it."

Lloyd found inspiration in the movies of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg as well as books by Michael Crichton and Stephen King. As Mick Carter, the drifter of the title, you've returned to your home town for a funeral and immediately got yourself caught up in something unexplainable. There's a murder to solve, but there's a deeper mystery than that. As you'd expect for a game that draws from Stephen King there's a spooky side to The Drifter, with Carter seemingly able to come back from the dead—but not without bringing something over from the other side when he does.

You can play a demo of The Drifter on Steam, and Powerhoof will be showing it at PAX Australia in the Indie Showcase area from October 6–8.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.