My experience with the point-and-click adventure genre has largely been limited to the escape room genre and visual novels, to the point where my worried colleagues are insisting I educate myself with games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. If I didn’t know better I’d think they were making them up, but one look at the genre’s crazy history and you’ll realize that’s not the case.
Thankfully, Scarecrow Studios came to my rescue during E3, letting me experience a playable build of their upcoming 3 Minutes to Midnight, an entirely new series that should make point-and-click fans happy. And possibly my colleagues. I hope.
Betty Anderson wakes up in a town and has completely lost her memory, as has everyone else in town. Now she has to talk with other characters and solve puzzles to figure out just what the heck happened and recover her lost memory. As you’d expect, not everyone in town can be trusted, and there’s a high chance that some people may not be who they say they are. That’s probably a bet you’ll want to take.
The puzzles I encountered were basic but intuitive, a combo that led to hilarious encounters, ranging from reciting the Apollo launch sequence to get a man out of a bathroom to crafting a crazy device with a plunger to retrieve a boat. I’ll admit that some puzzles, like adding citronella oil to a candle to drive off mosquitoes, did stump me at first since I thought it would be added to a water bottle to spray at them. This being a point-and-click adventure you can expect plenty of humor all-around, not all of which is aimed at younger fans. Try not to laugh when Betty yells out she’s got a “Code Brown!” to get a bathroom’s current occupant to finish their business.
Currently, 3 Minutes to Midnight is scheduled for release sometime next year for every platform and console under the sun, which should give Scarescrow Studios plenty of time to make it worth the wait.
