When I mentioned the Drifter in my Newsletter last month, I realized I don’t talk about the games I play often enough on here. So now I will try to start doing that. I’m probably not going to be doing detailed reviews or trenchant analysis, but I think it would be good to just plop my thoughts down so I can look back at them later, especially in case I ever manage to live my lifelong dream of getting into designing adventure games. I’m gonna call these Adventure Game Musings

I finished the Mermaid Mask today. It’s the most recent in the Detective Grimoire series of point-and-click mysteries. I’d already played the previous two in the series and enjoyed them, so I am not surprised to enjoy this one too.

The thing I thought about most during my time playing this game was how it is just clicking everything on everything. This is something they complained about in the adventure games of yore, you’d get stuck and just have to click every item in your inventory on every other thing in the game. The Grimoire games are like that, clicking every topic on every suspect, and it can feel daunting as the amount of suspects and topics grows. I find myself walking up to someone and needing to get their reactions to the 40-some things I need to ask them about and it seems like a lot, it seems like it’s gonna take forever, and I wonder “Is that what I want?”

I remember playing games as a kid and I loved the exploration aspect. The hours I spent exploring Mordavia or the Galaxy Galleria didn’t feel like wasted time even when I was stuck. It was fun, it was the experience I was looking for in a game. So why does in feel imposing now? Well, it’s because of the time investment. I don’t long for less time playing the game, I long for the days of youth when I could spend hours exploring a game world and it didn’t make me feel like my time was slipping away. That’s not the fault of the games.

I think that what the games have to do, then, is find a way to make me feel less bad about it. What the Mermaid Mask does to mitigate the issue is that those 40-some questions posed to a suspect are answered in fun ways by characters who are brought to life by great voice acting and animation. It’s a reward for the time invested, so I enjoyed that.

Do I think there are better ways? Well, sure. The opposite of rewarding a lot of clicks is to punish over-clicking, and I liked the way The Seance of Blake Manor did it, with the amounts of clicks you can do being limited. Once you’re told you CAN’T click on everything, it frees you from the feeling that you have to click on everything. Having to think and pick and choose what things you click makes a lot of sense to me in a mystery game. As an example, in the Mermaid Mask I found a box that required a number combination to open and when I asked another character about it, he just opened it for me. It was all sign-posted, the idea that the number could be a birthday is not only obvious in a real-world sense but also was brought up in the game, and the guy mentioned that he had been gathering the birthdays of the people in the cast. I can see how I would connect the dots and use that guy’s knowledge to solve the puzzle, but I didn’t solve it that way, I just got it done because I was asking the guy about everything. I didn’t get a sense of satisfaction of realizing it myself.

Now, that’s one example, there are a bunch of puzzles in the Mermaid Mask that I got to feel clever for solving (especially when I do it before the game started feeding me hints) and I wouldn’t want the Grimoire games to not have a ton of fun characters. The way they do it is the right choice for these games, it’s what I would come to these games for, but if I had to choose which I prefer I think finding a way to limit the clicking appeals more to me.

Good game though!

Gene Hackman as an Invader! This is one of the few things I knew going into the show, that Hackman would appear, but I don’t think I knew he was playing an Invader (and before I had seen the show, I can’t say I would’ve known what that meant anyway). I can say that he is probably not my favourite of the featured Invader enemies David Vincent has faced, but he’s dang good at it.

Okay, so the Invaders’ plan in this one is that they have these spores that they are experimenting with. If they work, they will be able to grow aliens in new bodies by the dozens. This addresses something that I’ve been thinking for a while: it seems like the Invaders are coming to Earth a handful at a time. It can be a struggle for them to get saucer here and when they do there’s only like five of them on there at the best of times. Take that (and the fact that David Vincent has been mowing them down when he can) and I don’t think there are a lot of the Invaders on Earth at any given time. Probably no more than a few thousand across the whole globe at any given time. That’s why these spores are so important, they could really build up their Earth-based armies.

Anyway, the spores are in a box for most of the episode. First the Invaders have . Then it gets stolen by some hot-rodders. Then, to avoid the Invaders who are after them, they stash it in some couple’s car. Then the couple gets rid of it so some kids have it. It’s a regular macguffin chase with the Hackmanvader getting frustrated by how hard it is to get his seeds back. This is the episode you’d have the Coen Brothers direct if you could.

Through all of this, of course, our hero David Vincent is on the case. He partners up with a cop named Ernie who saw the Invaders but he has a history with alcoholism that means he won’t be believed and could lose his job if he reports what he’s seen. Without getting too detailed, David Vincent uses a molotov cocktail to destroy the Hackmanvader and his seeds, so he’s got another victory and another ally. He tells Ernie not to file a report on what he’s seen, though, because he doesn’t want Ernie to lose his job. They can meet up in a year after Ernie has retired, they say, which means that I absolutely believe that in the era after the show ends David Vincent and Ernie do some alien hunts together.

After what I mentioned last time, I would be remiss if I didn’t notice that this episode also features a Black character, another cop at Ernie’s station, with more lines than the guy last episode. If this trend continues, hopefully the show can get to a point when it isn’t noteworthy every time it happens.

Aw geez, I am bad at keeping this website updated about Surrounded By Danger, the cooperative board game I was working on. When last I brought it up, three effing years ago, I was in the early days of making a version of the game that uses zombies as the enemies. Well, I am happy to report that I have a full working prototype of that version of the game now. The mechanics are pretty well ironed out and it has been playtested by over a dozen people, who seem to have enjoyed it.

The problem is, I don’t know where to go from there. I don’t know how one physically turns a prototype into a game. I know I’ll have to make the art for the cards and such, and a few years back I did tinker with drawing up some example cards, but I don’t know what file format the art needs to be in, I don’t know what dimensions it is supposed to have, and I don’t know what I do with it once I’ve got it. So I hit a wall.

I have not made any major changes to the game in a year or so now. It doesn’t need them anymore, the Zombie version of Surrounded By Danger is ready to be turned into a real game if I ever know how to do it. And I’ve got notes for other versions too! But I’m still at that wall.

I do hope that, if I have any measure of success with my Patreon then I could use that interest as a motivation to get past the wall, but right now I am stymied.

And maybe next month I will do a post that is more than just an update, but an actual discussion of the game…

Well, this has been the first month since I began my Patreon, so now I need to figure out how I’m going to deal with that. I think that every month I am going to do a newsletter like this in which I discuss what things I got done during the month. Let’s try that!

• First and foremost there is the article I wrote based on the choice of my Patron(s). My look into the first story found in the 1953 comic Young Men #21, Flash Foster And His High-Gear Hot-Shots. This is the first of what I intend as a series of looks at the kinds of stories they were giving to kids when superheroes were not the dominant genre of comics.
• Probably the thing I spent the most time working on this month is Cruciatus Animi Fracti, a one page solo-journaling RPG. I made it to submit to the One-Page RPG Jam 2026. I have enjoyed doing something for the Jam the last three years and I will continue to do so, though I’d really love to design a print-and-play RPG that isn’t designed to fit on a single page. Imagine the freedom! Someday, someday…
• To maintain my status as the world’s foremost reviewer of fictional beekeepers, I watched an episode of NCIS: Origins to review a guy named Linus Eckles. I gotta be honest, I didn’t enjoy the show, but that is never the beekeeper’s fault, and that’s what I am reviewing. Anyway, I can’t rebuke the show entirely if it is giving Patrick Fischler a paycheque.
• On the pop-culture website the Avocado I have an ongoing series of articles called Superman vs Bigots in which I take a look at stories from the Superman franchise that deal with themes of racism and such. This month I covered an episode of the television show “Superman and Lois” that was titled “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” that featured the show’s version of a classic Nazi superman foe.
• I did a profile for the Marvel Appendix website about a character called Shuffles. Shuffles is an shady underworld sort, an information dealer, who appeared in about five pages of comics in 1978 and has not been seen since. He’s a bit of a Blaxsploitation stereotype kinda guy, so maybe Marvel was embarrassed to acknowledge him (more likely I think nobody remembered him at all), but I think if you bring him back in a comic where he isn’t the sole representative of Black people he could just be a fun and flamboyant figure. I found absolutely no other profile for this guy on any of the Internet’s various websites where obsessive people like me track that sort of thing, so it is a point of pride that I got to him first.
• On the topic of Marvel, I decided that I am going to do a pixel art image of an obscure Marvel character each month for a while. I’ll only give my self a day to work on each one, because I could tinker with pixels forever and not be happy with the result, but my hope is that I will simultaneously be noticed by fans of the obscurities featured while also making them less obscure. It will surprise nobody who knows me that the first to get the treatment is the Rocket Racer.

Not everything I do is a project finished within a month that I can easily link to, but I will always have other things to talk about, so let’s do a category for that stuff.

• I admit that I’m still reluctant to this whole Patreon thing. I feel like if I’m going to pretend to be worth anyone’s time (let alone money), I need to be more professional-seeming. To that end, I’ve begun doing some cleaning-up around the ol’ Book of PDR here. A point of focus this month has been the webcomic Adventure Dennis, which is one of my earliest surviving works from on the Internet. For years now it has been confined to a little Javascript format that, while admittedly is kinda fun, is not a perfect format. So I’ve been giving each chapter of the comic its own page, hopefully easier for browsing. As I go I’ve also been including a sort of Commentary Track of footnotes at the bottom explaining references and stuff, when I can remember what I was referencing at least.
• During August I also participated in multiple online studies about aphantasia. It was into my thirties before I realized that I didn’t have the ability to visualize things in my head the way most people do, but to be fair aphantasia was barely acknowledged or studied before the 21st century. Years ago I joined the Aphantasia Network and have been receiving emails from them. I’d like to see the phenomenon more widely understood, so whenever I get an email about an online study I can participate in, if I have the time I try to do it. As I say, that happened twice this month.

It occurred to me that if I want to make myself seem human, I should talk about one or two of the things I enjoyed.

• This month I came across Chucky: The Game, a board game based on the horror movies about the killer doll. I am a horror fan and I am not kidding when I say that of all the long-running slasher franchises, Chucky is my favourite and it is not a close contest. But what really appeals to me about this game is that it is cooperative. I’m not a competitive person by nature and I find games where you have to compete against the other players annoying at best because I genuinely do not care about winning against my friends. But winning or losing alongside my friends is great! (I have, for years now, been working on Surrounded By Danger, a cooperative board game of my own design.) For the record Chucky: The Game does work with a single player, so even though I haven’t had a chance to try it with others yet, I have played alone and both killed and been killed by Charles Lee Ray.
• the Drifter is a point-and-click adventure game that came out last year. I had heard good things, so I was happy to finally check it out. I have loved adventure games for as long as I can remember and this one does some things I greatly enjoyed, especially with the interface. The genre is even now plagued by the soul-crushing difficulty and jankiness that cursed it in the olden days, so any time a game simplifies the interface in an elegant way, I am happy to think it might make it appealing to a younger generation. I sometimes find modern adventure games too easy (they are so afraid of the stigma of difficulty) but I didn’t mind this one. The only negative I can think to say at the moment is that there didn’t seem to be much in the way of alternate solutions to puzzles or different endings. I always maintain that the thing games can do that movies can’t is allow player agency, so I like when every player has variations in the story making it their own experience. The Drifter’s seemed very linear to me, so it isn’t the perfect adventure game ideal that exists in my head, but I can’t punish it for that. After all, it joins games like the first Gabriel Knight and Space Quest III in having a late-game location that is shaped like a cylinder.

Finally, I’ve got a file on my phone that is nothing but dumb little jokes I’ve thought of. Maybe if I dole them out once a month on here I can finally be free. Here’s this month’s!

Why shouldn’t you trust a small harp?
It might be a lyre.