GAME IS AWESOME! - voice acting is excellent. - interface is very friendly. - you can probably finish game with 4-5h. not necessarily a bad thing. - game has a nice atmosphere to it. i am giving it a negative for one reason: lazy-ass black and anticlimactic screens during WAY TOO MANY actions. in the old days that kind of stuff would be normally animated...

Only had to use every item in my inventory on every other item in my inventory twice. It's really good.

I clicked on the review screen, anxiously starting to type, words coming out of me like milk from a cow s udder. The game reeled me in and kept me playing for hours as I wanted to uncover how the story plays out. I quickly ended it and looked at the screen, clicked post review, hand trembling. A message for posterity - play this game

amazing VO great writing horrible gameplay and puzzle design to explain: the issue is the core gimmick you are basicaly a Dark Souls character (trying to avoid spoilers) which means you need to do things (in specific situations which come up often enough) in certain order or you die and are forced to repeat the whole process again mix this with quite some obscoure solving of these situations and it is just not fun either use a guide or watch a vid shame though: the art, writing and VO are real 10/10 but it is a game..and as a game, especialy as an adventure game it blows hard

The entire game has no animations. Monkey Island 1 back in 1990 was fully animated. This game opts to cut to black, and does the most heinous sin in all of gaming, telling instead of showing. Literally every scene that you would expect to have a cool animation just has a cut to black. It's honestly hard to believe how many people in the comments praise this game as a "new industry standard" when it's missing 35 year old features. Super disappointing. I would recommend almost literally any other point and click game on the market. In my opinion it's such a heinous issue that I genuinely don't even understand how the game released in this state. For a full priced point and click adventure game at $20 at that, you can go and buy any of the Wadjet Eye games, the Kathy Rain series, or a number of other games combined for the price of this, frankly, incomplete release. All of which are fully animated, and voiced!

Sorry but I hate I have to use right stick to navigate what I can interact before actual interacting. To many Damns in the dialogue. See if some patch solves this.

"Fancy a Cuppa?"

I didn't realize that homeless people lived such exciting lives. Maybe I need to go back in time and start over. Great game though, hope there's a other one in the works.

Okay Boss, here we go. The Drifter is the Doom/Half-Life of point and click adventures. It's bar raising, in my opinion and tries to drag the genre kicking and screaming into the future. What I like most about The Drifter is that it isn't a cozy or comedy game. It's an adult, gritty, serious, Grindhouse, nail biting thriller. That sort of thing has been sorely missing the genre for a while, at least among the more popular titles. I hope, and think, this will give the game some success as it will appeal to a wider audience. The game is expertly written. The plot beats and the story and characters are all great. The pacing is snappy, frantic and each chapter ends with a bang. Honestly it would be well suited for a Netflix series directed by The Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things). The story will get its hooks into you and pull you along. The art is gorgeous with saturated colors and lively backgrounds full of motion. The voice acting is top tier across many characters. The game / puzzle design is fantastic. Somehow the game straddles being too easy and basically a walking talking simulator vs being full of frustrating complex moon logic. All the items make sense and fit the story and setting. As you progress you get more and more items and more and more rooms and characters to explore, so often the puzzle is in sorting out how and where and who to combine the items with. It all feels fair and natural and I never blamed the game - once - for me being stumped. There are lots of varied locations and the game never feels stale. The soundtrack is also great and weaves in and out of high action beats and more low key tunes for exploration and investigation. it's probably worth picking up the soundtrack if you're a fan. Makes a good background track for working. The controls are fantastic. Mouse and keyboard are supported. You can toggle on a hot spot highlighter if you fear missing something, although the game never devolves into a pixel hunt. The controller support and implementation is also great. It's fairly new and unique but works well for the genre and juggling inventory items and all the hot spots in the game. It's easy to sit back in your chair or on the couch and play with controllers. All in all I can't recommend The Drifter enough. If you like adventure games, or narrative games, or gritty sci fi adventures then it's for you. It's 100% for you if you enjoy the niche of point and click adventures and in my opinion is Game of the Year in that genre by a wide margin. So make some popcorn, dim the lights and fire up The Drifter. It's an epic thrill ride you won't soon forget. Certified banger. 5/5 10/10

The game is okay, it's finally out! I remember wish listing this years ago when I played the demo. With how long it took to come out I expected a more 'finished' state. The story is great, and all in all for the 8 chapters it boasts I enjoyed most of them. There are several predictable twists that are so foreshadowed and obvious that I struggle to call them twists. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, a good story can have a couple crappy moments. Chapters 6 and 7 are the weakest story beat wise, as there is a tonal shift that happens and it honestly just left me disinterested. I pushed through to the end, but I do wish that the story had a more satisfying conclusion. I don't spoil anything but the end of the story has a very sudden character change that doesn't make much sense for our protagonist because there's no real reason for them to have a change of heart. It's a sweet ending, but it wasn't earned. There's very little pixel hunting, and the "adventure game" moments are completely gone. You don't see stupid leaps of logic in this one. However you will see constant back tracking to pad the runtime starting from chapter 4. This adventure games biggest failure is that it chooses to use a black screen instead of animation, often. So much that it might as well have been a black screen with white text as the main story telling device. I understand it's a money saving measure to cut out animations in favor of narration, but visuals are the second main thing you come to an adventure game for. "Show don't tell" is not on display here, they prefer the much less coveted "tell don't show". I enjoy the cast of characters and voice actors, and the art style throughout is fantastic. However the experience really is brought down by the cuts to black and the protagonist describing what's happening. It removes you from an otherwise exciting moment so that you can pretend like you're not playing a video game and instead reading a book. If they patched this, which they should, I would change my review to recommended because that's the biggest fault of the game.

I love these kinds of games but I totally lost interest when I the screen started turning black. In the first few minutes, every single action that required a simple animation was blacked out.

In my experience, The Drifter is one of the best point and click adventure games ever made. The story was immedately engaging, and the artwork and music does a great job of making the environment come alive. The voice acting is superb and really made the characters instantly recognizable and interesting. In particular I was impressed how the voice actor for the main character brought emotions to life (especially panic/fear!). The gameplay is very varied and presents several high-stakes situations where choosing the right option was critical! If you're a fan of point and click adventure games that engage and evolve the gameplay experience, I can't recommend The Drifter enough. Review notes: I was fortunate enough to be able to playtest and play the game to completion before release, but I asked the developer to remove me from the playtest list so I could purchase it.

10/10 would kill myself to go back in time again

If, on my death bed, someone asked me to recommend them a game, I would reflexively say "The Drifter". If You never played a point and click adventure game, this would be probably the best start; the controls are intuitive, the challenge is satisfying, the pixel graphics are on another level, the atmosphere is gritty and grimy, grounded with sarcastic humor, the pacing is on point, and the music is, I would say, perfect. My only qualm is that it pulled me in so hard that after finishing the game in ~10 hours I was left yearning for more desperately - and I'm hoping that this game gets the attention it deserves so we can get more from the creators.

Who knew hobos led such interesting lives

I was going to give this a positive, until around 3-4 hours in. Pros 1. Graphics. 2. Voice acting. Meh 1. Story. Cons 1. I loved this game until i got to some puzzles that were not exactly not logical, they were.. i dont know how to put it.. 90s Sierra design, or early LucasGames quest design. When you wander around aimlessly between maybe 3-4 screens, just to realize that you havent used object x on person y, or object y on object x after you have spoken to person z. I realize what im saying is basically what the base of any quest game is, but this one just annoyed me. Ill try to explain without spoilers, there is this pretty big location in the game, quite a few hours in, where there are a lot of points of interaction, people and items and questions included. So you are in this location, with a very vague objective, so you go around wondering: trip 1- you speak and interact with everything\one you see, just to get an item, with which you are not exactly sure what to do. So you do trip 2 - do the same thing over poking a new item or asking a new conversation topic. Rinse and repeat until you find the path forward. That is not always the case in the game, but there are plenty of times when this formula is used, which, to me, is just bad design. As a person who loves quests, and there have been a few good ones this year, this was more of a "get the right trigger to trigger the next trigger" quest, instead of "Oh yeah! i remember that this dude wanted that, and now i have it, and now i cant wait for what happens next!", it was more of a "oh yay finally". I didnt finish the game, nor do i intend to. Which is a shame, the premise and story looked and played great on paper. Realization though... a bit lacking, i got the sense sometimes, that this was done intentionally, to prolong game time, but thats just me. Again, im glad there are still quests being made, hope these guys make another game in the future, and im not saying i "wasted" money on this game. I enjoyed my time while it lasted, it just didnt last as long as i thought it would.

cool game. interesting story. thanks, i enjoyed it. :)

Oi! Fair dinkum bonzah of a game! A certified rippah! 10/10. Would chuck me dead mum's ashes at the coppah's noggin again.

Tell, don´t show

You start playing from the beginning because you loved the demo, and there it is: the cool art, the cool soundtrack... and that black screen you thought it was there because the animation wasn´t finished. And another one while the character narrates again what should be animated. Maybe it is a narrative resource, just like in cinema, but then the character opens the trunk of a car while saying he opens the trunk, and breathes air from a jerry can while telling you he is doing exactly that. So you keep playing a little dissapointed as you realise that there are animations that have been left out on purpose. And then the cameras fades to black, and then again and again and all these years waiting for this.

This game is so good. It had me grinning ear to ear, never had me angry, and only a few times were the puzzles too much for my tiny brain. The art is amazing. The voice acting is amazing. The passion poured into this game is amazing. The story is amazing. I might be too much of an optimist, but this game is a ten out of ten in my books. The only thing I want from this game is more of this game. Now excuse me while I go wish upon a star for a part two or dlc exploring the side characters, specifically Hara. He's my boy.

Wow. OG LucasArts level good! Wish i could experience it for the first time again. ...Wait...

I've been waiting for the release of this game since it was first announced and I am extremely happy to say that it surpassed my already high expectations. In a sea of triple-A flops, indies reign supreme. Don't hesitate to pick up this game, it's well worth it.

I absolutely loved playing The Drifter Demo. The full game does not disappoint. The game is beautifully crafted, in both story and art. It's obvious this was a labor of love. I believe the game will go down as one of the best games in the Adventure Game Genre.

The Drifter is a new standard in point and click adventures and deserves to be spoken about in the same breath as the very best the genre has to offer. The look, sound, and feel of the game are superb and it tells a story that never stops being thrilling. All in all, it’s an essential purchase for anybody who has even a passing interest in the genre.