If I think really hard about it, I’m pretty sure that the first videogame that I ever played was a supposedly educational point-and-click adventure about a trip to the beach, which I played with my Mum at the local library. I guess this experience must have nestled in my brain somewhere, as ever since I’ve had a soft spot for the genre, even though some of the games requiring desperate leaps of logic have me reaching for the off button. Detective Gallo, recently released on PlayStation 4, and developed by Italy-based FootPrints Games thankfully doesn’t feature too many ridiculous puzzles, and instead focuses on delivering a noir mystery, punctuated by bright colors and a citizenry comprised of poultry.
Detective Gallo puts players in the gumshoes of the titular Gallo, a gruff chicken attempting to set the world to rights by solving mysteries and treating both witnesses and suspects as one and the same. The mystery that you’re tasked with solving here begins with the death of a number of exotic plants, but soon grows and evolves into a tale that includes shady businessmen, mysterious taxi drivers, and even an other-worldly presence with aspirations for world domination. Detective Gallo is unlikely to win any awards for its narrative, but its entertaining enough, and contains enough twists and turns to keep players interested, and guessing where the story is going to go next.
Visually, Detective Gallo is reminiscent of the MS-DOS era of point-and-click adventures, but cleaned up for the modern day. The game is entirely hand-drawn, and this lends the experience an air of Saturday morning cartoons, with bright colors and thick outlines making the game feels almost as if it’s popping out of your TV. The difficulty curve matches the same sort of feel, with much of Detective Gallo feeling like an introduction to the genre. There’s minimal combination of items, and much of the puzzle solving, at least early on, consists of showing the right item to the right character, which causes the story to branch off and open up new possibilities. The puzzles do get a little more complex later on, but I never felt as if I was trying to brute force my way through puzzles, and there were a number of occasions where I knew exactly which character I needed to go and see next, rather than fumbling blindly around hoping for a solution to show itself.
Unfortunately, the simplicity of a lot of the puzzles is brought about by the lack of options available to the player, in terms of both characters and locations. There are only about five locations to visit, and this means that a lot of your time with Detective Gallo will be spent speaking to the same characters and visiting the same places, just under slightly different conditions. There’s a definite linearity to proceedings as well, meaning that although solving some puzzles might feel like it’s opened up multiple paths to take, you often still have to speak to one particular character to progress any further.
For veterans of the genre, the lack of depth to the experience may detract from their overall enjoyment, but I found that in certain ways, it added to the experience for me. It’s not very often that I’ll get home from work and feel like loading up a mentally taxing game, but Detective Gallo struck just the right balance of being relaxing but still requiring me to think about what I was doing and how to progress. Combined with the attractive visual design and strong use of color, I found Detective Gallo to be an enjoyable experience overall, if a little lacking in environmental variety and a truly compelling narrative. If you’re interested in the point-and-click genre, but have been put off in the past by their sometimes steep learning curve, then Detective Gallo is a great place to start, and the fact that you can play it while sitting on the couch only encourages me to further recommend it.
