Short game, short test. We are going to try to analyze the message transmitted in the small independent game Pants Quest, through a format as short as the practice itself of the video game object here. And as you can see, I’m pulling the line to make a little volume, because otherwise this test would already be coming to an end. But let’s consider that it hits its start first, and I just gained 5 lines to say nothing. Goodnight all.
This test was written in 16 minutes
It’s dark, it’s cold outside the bed. Outside, it’s raining and the drops are hitting the tiles with an almost military and incessant rhythm. It’s Monday, or maybe Tuesday, anyway it’s morning and outside of bed, our hero has only one goal today: to go to work. Except that, for that, you must first wake up and put on a futal. But it’s that kind of day where nothing goes. It’s cold, it’s hungry, it’s raining, so the objective will be redefined: make a coffee, eat a slice of bread, feed this damn cat who sticks to his coattails and meows at the top of his voice. And find THE futal (obviously the only one in the house). Pants Quest had one promise: a man has to find his pants to go to work, but he can’t. The promise is completely successful.
In a series of events that will completely escape your control, you will embody a character who oscillates between the loser and the poor nice guy, which clearly makes him the hero of this story, the everyday hero. Pants Quest tells, in a realistic coldness, a normal and banal start to the day, a life without particular interest and events that are not. A chance fall, a lost object in the house, shots that jump, an alien attack. No, actually, not the last. Because here, it’s real life, not much happens. So, inevitably, when a series of adventures fall on the corner of your nose without warning, it becomes something. It even gets huge. To tell this story which is almost nothing incredible, but is nevertheless a little, the developer has chosen point & click in its most noble and illustrious format.
We are therefore in a LucasArts-style adventure game, with the usual taskbar reduced to the simplest: take, look, use, open. No talk button, you have no one to talk to in this empty apartment looking for your benard. Aesthetically we are also on 8-bit families, with a clear and distinct reference to games like Day of the Tentacle or Zak McKracken and to the typical humor of games under the ScuMM engine. No voice either, no music, just some sound effects (with headphones, it’s so well rendered that I had to remove it more than once thinking it came from my office) and the sound of the rain . And this cat that keeps meowing and preventing us from getting our hands on the falzar.
french film simulator
How long are you going to spend watching this poor man deal with the setbacks of his completely lame life and the series of mini daily disasters that will lead him from his bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bathroom? baths and from the bathroom to the basement? A closed session of one hour, neither more nor less. Point & click fans can have fun clicking on absolutely all the objects in the apartment, not all of which are of interest but allow the hero to have a conversation with you. We don’t have time to get bored. To break the monotony, the software also allows itself some simplistic mini-games at times, such as a very “meta”: you must complete three levels of a platform game on your console to unlock an item… The designer also had the wise idea of not putting a button to skip the few monologues, otherwise in 30 minutes it’s over. A slowness and a poverty of action that fascinates, to the point of having done it twice. No, just kidding, it’s because I had a savegame bug that forced me to start over. Hopefully this will be fixed for the official launch on March 2. Go for it, plus the end will surprise you (omg it goes wrong (youtube thumbnail head (subscribe))).
