So many games, and so little time to cover them all!  

Between the site’s scheduling and the amount of great looking indie titles releasing every month, there sometimes just isn’t time to shine a detailed spotlight on every single one of them. As such, our QuickShot reviews are designed to provide smaller bitesized reviews on a few other releases along with some footage of it in action!

Brok is a gator. Specifically, he’s an InvestiGator. Living with the son of his dead wife, he’s left to bring him up as he struggles to make ends meet in this run-down futuristic world. Worse still, he’s plagued with nightmares about his wife’s death that seem to pin the responsibility on him: a fact that’s made worse by his fuzzy memory of the events. It’s hard for Brok, but all he can really do is go on and take care of himself and his step-son Graff as best he can.

As a private InvestiGator, Brok takes on a number of cases throughout his journey, although I can’t say I got particularly invested in many of them. That’s ok though as his relationship with Graff and the mystery surrounding his wife’s death proves to be the biggest draw of the storyline. The world is also well-crafted, with it’s dystopian society of thugs and pollution … not to mention the fact that humans are nowhere to be found, with animals of varying types taking their place. A lot of thought has been put into making it a believable world, and it’s one I’d like to see more of in the future.

BROK the InvestiGator release window

Touted as a ‘punch and click’ experience, BROK the InvestiGator fuses together the ‘point and click’ and ‘beat em up’ genres in an effort to make something completely new. Utilising a single button to switch between detective mode and action mode, the transition between the two works surprisingly fluidly.

Detective mode makes the game function as a standard point and click adventure. You talk to people, you pick up objects to put in your inventory, and you act with stuff. Brok (or Graff, who you’ll also find yourself controlling) has limited movement within this mode as he wanders to wherever you want him to go. The puzzles themselves never resort to moon-logic like in many genre classics, so figuring it what to do should never end up being too frustrating. There is a hint system available by using the ads that you can locate in game, but it’s a rather convoluted system and doesn’t really guarantee you a useful hint. It’s unique, but I think it’s more likely to encourage people to google the answers rather than mess around finding ads. On the flip side they aren’t too hard to find, so there will likely be enough for you to at least give the hint system a shot if you are running out of ideas.

When flicking over to the action mode, Brok loses the ability to talk with his mouth – instead opting to talk with his fists instead. Controls feels reminiscent of most classic beat em up titles, making it easy for genre fans to slip into, but don’t expect a huge amount of depth. For the most part it’s just punching, jumping, blocking, and dodging. It gets the job done, especially as a bonus mode in an adventure game, but would be far too basic if it were its own standalone thing.

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But that’s fine, as the real beauty with action mode isn’t how it’s implemented, but how it mixes up the point and click formula to make it a bit more exciting for people who aren’t point and click fans. Talking to people not getting you anywhere? Maybe it’s time to resort to some fisticuffs instead! There’s a nice blend to ensure that the game never gets too bogged down with inventory puzzles and chatting. Likewise, the game also contains various minigame style puzzles to solve from time to time in order to help keep you engaged over the long twenty hour runtime. Whilst it’s still not enough to feel slightly fatigued by the end, the developer certainly makes a praiseworthy attempt at trying to make the game feel fresh.

The variety isn’t where the game deserves the most praise, however, as the amount of accessibility that the game has on offer is honestly quite astounding. Whilst there were quite a fair few options available at launch, the recent patch of the game made it so that you can (quite literally) play the game blind. In addition to tweakable font sizes, character colourisation, and even the ability to skip almost every fight and puzzle, there’s some great narrated audio that will go as far as to essentially describe the room you are in, as well as identify interactable objects that you are standing next to. It’s an incredible feat for a game such as this, and COWCAT must really be applauded for the amount of effort put in to ensure that almost anyone can play the game. 

VERDICT
The mixture of beautiful visuals, a wide range of accessibility options, and the variety of gameplay elements that help to vary up the gameplay all makes BROK the InvestiGator one of the easier games in the genre to get into. Whilst the game may not be perfect, there’s still a lot jam-packed into here and it makes me want to see more from this wonderful world in the future.