Twilight Oracle bills itself as a comedy point-and-click adventure game, but that’s not the vibe you get from screenshots. The vibrant, bright, electric colour palette and zany fantasy elements make it feel more like an arthouse experiment in how far you may push a pixel. It’s a visual delight, and overstimulating in all the best ways - playing Twilight Oracle feels like being a cat buried in catnip.
But a point-and-click adventure it is, and in this respect, it takes a traditional approach. You move from screen to screen, picking up random items, hunting through pixels, and solving puzzles in the most bizarre fashion. One memorable sequence has you enlisting your mind-reading friend to read the mind of a poor sea creature torn from the ocean in the name of puzzle-solving.
It boasts genre hallmarks that have been around since the days of Sierra, and marries up nicely with the graphics. It plays like a love letter to those days of yore when death would be right around the corner, and the logic was almost non-existent. Luckily, Twilight Oracle is a modern game, so frustrating deaths and a total disrespect for your personal time are not problems you’ll have to deal with. In fact, the game comes in at a rather short two and a half hours or so - it’s a good one to spend an evening with.
Steam tells me I spent 2.8 hours with the game, and this might be reduced quite a bit if only I’d spotted a rather well-camouflaged scarf quicker than I did.
One classic element brought back in force is the humour. I don’t know about you, but for me, the best point-and-click games are the ones that lean into the ridiculous and do all they can to make you laugh. Your protagonist, Leo, is a typical adventure hero type - a streak of valour blended with cynicism and laziness. Naturally he gets some of the best lines in the game; I audibly laughed at a certain early line referencing circumcision. But Leo isn’t a solitary clown in a world of stoics; the whole game gets in on it. I found myself grinning so much throughout that my cheeks hurt by the time the credits rolled.
If there’s one thing a little lacking, it would be the difficulty. Crucial items are quite often found strewn about on the place, with no challenge in finding them, and the puzzles they solve are often so obvious that point A to B comes to you in a flash. ‘Oh, I need to open this locked door? Surely it couldn’t be as easy as using the boxing glove on an extendo arm? Oh… that worked. Huh.’ This criticism is little in the face of how enjoyable the experience is, however.
Twilight Oracle is a strong early entry in this year’s promising roster of adventure games. It draws all the right elements from the classics of the genre and, with its striking visuals, stamps its own mark on the scene. Silly puzzles, cheesy humour, and slightly over-the-top voice acting make for a memorable package of fun.
