review

By flotsam

3 Minutes to Midnight

Scarecrow Studio

If elaborate, zany, animated 2D adventures in the vein of things Lucasarts are your fancy, you will likely find a lot to like about this. Certain aspects however, especially when taken together, might also wear you out.

It’s the late 1940s, in a desert town somewhere, and Betty wakes as a result of a large explosion to find that she and everyone else in town have amnesia. Something is clearly going on, and Betty sets off to find out what. She could not have imagined what awaits her.

What awaits you is one of the bigger games I have played in a while. Too big in some ways, and while I feel almost heretical in saying that, in my view less would have been more. Some things needed an edit in and of themselves, other things were impacted by those things, and the cumulative impact overwhelmed me at times. At the same time, there are a number of positive aspects in how the game works which need mentioning, as well as responsive makers who continues to look to enhance the experience.

To avoid any doubt, I did have fun. Hopefully I can adequately explain all the contributing bits and pieces.

First off, the game looks a treat, full of richly detailed and extensive cartoony environments. Many screens are chock full of things to interact with, and even more to just look at, perhaps in search of one of the myriad of pop-culture references. Some scenes are rather gorgeous in their construction, and there are a lot of them to enjoy. They slide in various directions as you walk around, so be sure to explore all the way to the edges lest you miss a pathway to somewhere else.

You don’t have a map, so perhaps take a note or two about where various locations are. I did on occasion find myself wondering e.g., where I saw the costume shop or how to get back there, and as your feet are required in order to traverse the landscape (there is no fast travel apart from double clicking an exit point, which will then jump you to the next screen) looking for a ‘lost’ location can take a little while.

Having said that, you will be criss-crossing in any event in order to achieve your objectives and find the items you require. As is the case in many such games, finding and using inventory items is a key part of progressing, and there are lots of them to be found. Helpfully the playable characters will discard items you no longer need, and occasionally purge their ‘pockets’ so you don’t tend to have too many to deal with at any one time.

This is extra helpful given the fact that many conundrums can be solved in more than one way. I haven’t played more than once so can’t provide any personal insights, but perusing some walkthroughs indicates that the solutions can be wildly varied, and that various items you come across will never be needed given the solution you find. Getting rid of them periodically limits the potential frustration which can come from inventory management.

Speaking of which, using the inventory is fairly plain sailing. Open the inventory and then right click to examine an item, left click to try and use it in the game world or on another item. A little animation will occur if the items can be combined, an action I found rather endearing.

Your hunt for items can be helped by the ability to highlight hotspots, and as there is so much detail in many scenes you will likely find it useful. The hotspots themselves seem reasonably generous so if you want to just explore with your curser have at it. Most of the hotspots aren’t items you can take, but they may elicit some helpful feedback, or a pithy comment, or maybe a bit of humour. Whichever, right clicking can pay dividends and you will need to be inquisitive.

You will also need to be garrulous as conversations feature heavily. Click a character to begin a chat and then choose your topic from the available dialogue tree. You can back out almost any point, but certain responses are needed to trigger the way forward. Dialogue trees in all their branches can be extensive, some topics have seemingly endless responses, and you will likely look to exhaust all topics to make sure you hit any triggers. As such, you will do an awful lot of talking.

This was certainly one area where less would have been more, and to that end the makers have patched the game so a menu item allows you to show game-progressing dialogue. It arrived about halfway through my playthrough and I welcomed it. I accept that using it makes the rest of the tree largely redundant, but I tended to turn it on and off, and also dipped into other topics anyway. You can of course ignore it altogether but it is now there if you need it.

Cutscenes too are many and can be lengthy, and while I was happy to sit and enjoy many of them, I confess there were times I wanted the ability to fast forward. This tended to be when I wanted to do something in particular (e.g., visit the next location), but the game would intrude and insert a cutscene. It was a ‘sum of the parts’ sort of thing, and that there was one cutscene where I had that option made me want it on other occasions.

It pays to be patient, particularly early on. I spent a good deal of time going everywhere I could, talking to most everyone completely and looking at pretty much everything in order to work out what my objectives might be. Right from the get-go lots of the locations are open to you, so you certainly won’t feel constricted or restrained.

Most of the puzzling is inventory based, but there are a handful of out and out puzzles. They aren’t hard, until they are, but by accident I found that failing and going back in gives you the option to skip the puzzle. I can’t confirm that it applies to all of them (I think it was the second last puzzle I encountered where I stumbled across it) but I was especially pleased to know about it when I got to the last one. I missed whatever clue/s there might have been and would probably still be trying to work it out given how it operates. Kudos to the makers for that aspect.

The conundrums are numerous, and are often solved in that elaborate convoluted way that is a characteristic of these sorts of games. Tenacity will be required, not just generally but specifically; some solves require you to do the same thing multiple times. I was stumped more than once, including not even knowing what I was missing. While there were times when the scope of the endeavour made the idea of going back over things too daunting, heading me off to a walkthrough, at other times just knowing that there might be another way forward invigorated me; I wasn’t perhaps looking for a single missed item somewhere in the broad canvass but perhaps could unearth a whole different thread or other items that might lead somewhere useful.

As intimated back at the start, you play Betty for the bulk of the game, although in the middle-ish part you get to play a different character (you can find out who that is by yourself). Betty is peppy, perky, brimming with enthusiasm and verve. She will talk to you through the fourth wall (the game also does that periodically) and interject even when she isn’t on screen. She is brash, opinionated and definitely a teen. She is voiced accordingly, a tad shrill at times perhaps, but I enjoyed being her. She does bring an overall YA ‘scooby’ tinge to things, but there is so much else happening that I didn’t find it domineering.

The humour that abounds can be similarly tinged, and while it doesn’t always work, my funny is your cringe worthy so enough said.

Everything is voiced, and the numerous NPCs run the gamut from dodgy to quirky (voice-wise). Many have a goofy-ish or stereotypical air about them that suits their particular voice. Across so many of them, I thought on the whole it was well done.

The game plays in the third person and autosaves periodically and you can manually save any time, and both have multiple slots. There are some sequences towards the end where the game won’t save (auto or manually), but near as I could tell nothing adverse comes from this except that it forces you to keep playing until you complete that particular part.

Your choices apparently affect how the narrative plays out as well, and there are multiple endings depending on how those things go. My ‘Better Luck Next Time’ ending was abrupt and disappointing, and perhaps some others were too. I say that because an Epilogue has now been added to provide “a more satisfying conclusion” as a result of players wanting more closure for the characters (as explained at the Steam page). As at the time of writing, it only unlocks once you get the good ending, so my ending remains as it was.

How things change won’t be discernible unless you play again, but it does offer a reason to do so. I am hoping too that the under construction ‘progress tracker’ might assist in that regard. It was available when I started but has since been taken down for a makeover in order to provide a better version. I am hoping it will help me work out where I might leap back in (assuming I have a saved game around that point)* or at least do something different at that spot. I did get a pop-up at one point in the game which said something like “I might regret that,” so there’s that too.

You get around through point and click, using the keyboard to do a few other things. You can tweak settings in the menu, including the levels of the music and ambient sounds. Play a tutorial if you wish before you get started, but most players will be able just to jump straight in.

To sum up, while at times the sheer volume of stuff forced me to come up for air, I had fun. Well done to the makers for launching something so big and bold, and for continuing to tweak it to meet the audience. It has ultimately left me intent on going back to get the good ending, which is praise enough.

I played on:

OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB

* Having interrogated the games I can load, I have about 20, and none earlier than Chapter 3. Only one is a manual save (I rarely have more than one) which suggests that there comes a point at which later autosaves push out the earlier ones. I mention it only because you might want to strategically delete saves to ensure you can re-enter across the full course of the game.

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October 2024

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