I’ve liked point and click games ever since I was a young child, and I enjoyed rediscovering the genre earlier this year with Elroy and the Aliens.
But for all of the good aspects of this genre, it’s not exactly one I would call exciting or thrilling from a storytelling perspective. These games tend to be a bit more goofy, pleasant, and fun. The general concept of searching areas for random ass items, and finding really quirky and out there ways to combine them and use them doesn’t really lend itself to a tightly paced and intense narrative.
While I’m sure there are several games out there that would qualify as thrilling point and click narratives, the first one I have personally experienced is The Drifter. The Drifter has all the trappings of a standard point and click narrative game, but it also has tight pacing, plenty of exciting moments, and it’s even really cinematic in spots.
Sometimes, the weight of genre conventions hold this game back from reaching the absolute highest of highs, but either way, if you want one of the best stories of 2025, you should be checking this one out.
Do They Make “Down Under” Jokes At Australian Funerals?
You play The Drifter as Mick Carter. Mick is heading back to his hometown after many years away for a funeral. It doesn’t take long on his journey for absolutely everything to go wrong. Mick witnesses a murder and is then also killed. However, after he dies, Mick wakes up just a bit before his death so that he can make different decisions and avoid a grizzly end. He also ends up being accused of murder after he escapes this situation. This sets in motion a journey where Mick needs to both clear his name and figure out what is going on with his ability to escape death.
The biggest strength of The Drifter is how relentless its plot is. From that opening scene, the game hooks you in, and it never lets go. There’s always multiple objectives that feel urgent in the game, between the central mystery and other life or death matters. Just when you start feeling like you have a grasp on things, something changes that puts you back on your heels all over again. The game has nine chapters, and it is at the end of each of these chapters when the game really shines the most. At the end of seemingly every chapter, I was either saying “whoa” or I needed to sit for a second to process what had just happened. The game builds up to multiple crescendos and delivers masterfully on almost every single one of them.
This plot is also consistently enhanced by some great characters and phenomenal voice acting. Every character in the game gets fleshed out pretty well, even if they have somewhat limited screen time. They all have their own little personality trait that makes them stand out without it being too over the top. Just as importantly, the voice acting in the game is absolutely top-notch. Frankly, I was not expecting some of the best voice acting this year to be in a $20 indie game, but everyone knocked it out of the park here. Mick’s voice actor, Adrian Vaughan, is especially great. Vaughan not only has a lot of lines as Mick, but he also narrates the game as Mick as well. He makes slight adjustments to his delivery but still inflects with the emotion that Mick is feeling at given points when he narrates, and I really enjoyed it. I thought every voice actor did a great job of bringing their characters to life, but Vaughan is especially strong here.
I also enjoyed how The Drifter merges several different genres together. There’s a bit of a crime thriller here, there’s science fiction elements, and there is definitely horror as well. Also, the game’s developers are located in Australia, so there’s an Australian flair that you don’t see too often in video games. This all blends well with its lovely pixelated visuals, some smart art direction, and tense music to create something that feels very unique. All of these elements make this game feel very cinematic in a way that I think is rare in this particular genre.
My only real complaint with the story is that I felt it could have done a few more interesting things with its themes. The Drifter has a heavy emphasis on both grief and death. It has a nice message with these themes, but it tackles them in the way you’d expect every single time. While there were plenty of moment to moment surprises with the core plot, everything regarding Mick’s character arc is about as generic as it gets. This isn’t the end of the world, but it kind of stood out with how strong and unique everything else was. That still doesn’t take much away from what a thrill ride the entire story was.
Point And Click on DEEZ NUTS mirite??
While The Drifter feels bold in many ways for the point and click genre, it mostly sticks to the basics with its gameplay. The game puts Mick in a variety of locales over the course of the game, and your goal is to explore, find various items, and then find different ways to use them in order to advance the story. At times, you also need to take your items and combine them to make something else. Once again, it’s pretty common for the genre.
The good news is that The Drifter’s puzzles are generally pretty fair. There were only a few puzzles in the entire game that I thought had odd or slightly obtuse solutions, which is better than plenty of others in the genre. If you talk to everyone and explore each area of the map, you should usually be able to figure out what to do next.
The game also throws a lot more cinematic and intense situations than your average point and click game. You will end up on the run from enemies, or sometimes in firefights, and have to figure out a puzzle solution while under attack. Some of these puzzles have time limits, but most don’t seem to. Admittedly, it can be a bit off to have someone shooting at you while you are behind a barrel as you fumble around with eight different items trying to figure out what the game wants you to do. This is probably why more intense narratives don’t usually pick this format. But I appreciated that it was a bit different, even if it’s a bit odd sometimes.
My main issue with the point and click gameplay comes down to something that is also common in the genre but feels way worse than usual here. The puzzle solving in The Drifter requires way too much backtracking. Puzzles will constantly have you do one thing in an area, just to go back to your previous area, just to go back to that first area. There are many times where, in order to advance the game, you have to go back and talk to someone after you’ve made progress, and you have to do this multiple times over the course of the chapter. For a game that I feel like elevates this genre in multiple ways, it was disappointing that The Drifter still managed to give in to some of the worst elements of the genre as well.
One way that The Drifter does try to take the genre in a more modern direction is with its interface. The game doesn’t highlight items that you can interact with or make it really obvious within its art, like some other games. Instead, there’s a wheel at the bottom of the screen that helps guide you to each thing that you can interact with. Sometimes, you can’t actually do anything with these various items in the environment, but they have flavor text that adds some extra depth and detail to the particular scene you are in. This system allows the art in the game to stick to its style while not feeling like it has been overly designed for a video game. There were a few times when items were close together, and it was a little awkward to select what I actually wanted to use. The item select screen also gets a little clunky to navigate once you have over a certain amount of items, but overall, I think this system works pretty well.
My favorite part of the interface was an “objectives” menu that helps guide you throughout the journey. At any point, you can pull up a menu, and it will have five or more different goals for Mick as he goes through his adventure. These help keep you focused on what to do next, but they also serve as a really nice plot refresher tool, which is helpful for me since I’m usually juggling multiple games at once.
What If They Made “The Drifter 2” But It’s Just a Racing Game
I came into The Drifter with a lot of perceptions of what a point and click adventure game is rightly or wrongly.
In many ways, this game smashed those perceptions. The Drifter is way cooler than I ever expected. It proves that you can create a very cinematic and exciting adventure within this genre.
The way this game defied my expectations in so many ways also seemed to make the moments where it falls comfortably into the standards of the genre a bit more jarring. But even with those few complaints, The Drifter delivers one hell of a ride, making it a game that any narrative adventure fan should try out, even if you aren’t usually a fan of this format.
Score: 8.5/10
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