Pixelhunter – Problem Sleuth

Welcome to Pixelhunter, a blog about the past, present and future of the Point and Click Adventure genre, with perhaps a special emphasis on the future, because if Double Fine’s recent landmark Kickstarter project is anything to go by, this genre is far from dead.

It may seem strange to start this series by discussing a web comic, but illustrator Andrew Hussie’s ingenious creations bear more than a few similarities with the genre, so bear with me. Attracting over 600,000 unique visitors a day MSPaint Adventures named after its mode of production and structured as mock text based adventure, with page transitions triggered by commands such as ‘PS:  Retrieve arms from safe’ is one of the most successful web comics on the internet. After initial experiments in interactive storytelling with the aborted Jail Break and Bards’ Quest (the latter of which mimicked the structure of a choose your own adventure story), both of which saw Hussie rely on fan feedback on the site’s forum to move forward the frankly random narrative, he managed to strike gold with the astonishingly realised Problem Sleuth. Meanwhile, his current work, Homestuck, is one of the longest comics on the net and ambitiously builds on the innovations of Problem Sleuth by incorporating flash animations, full mini-games and fan created music and art into the story (there are already nine compilation CDs put out by the site’s label What Pumpkin), further blurring the boundaries between game and narrative.

Pose like a team cause shit just got real!

Problem Sleuth, which is probably the best starting point, is a parody of the film noir, whilst containing a myriad of references to seemingly every videogame known to man. It begins with three detectives (Problem Sleuth, Ace Dick and Pickle Inspector) trapped in their respective offices by Mobster Kingpin, but quickly escalates into an epic battle with Kingpin’s ascended demonic form that runs for at least half of the comic. During the course of their adventures the three detectives drink whisky in forts constructed from their office furniture in order to enter a fantasy realm where they engage in diplomatic relations with several warring factions (namely the Weazels, Clowns, Pigs and Elves), develop an array of combat operandi (Final Fantasy-esque limit breaks that each have demanding requirements to trigger), engage in time travel paradoxes, develop female alter egos (except for Ace Dick whose imagination stat is just so unbelievably shitty), play a series of boardgames with death and tear the universe in half.

The comic is a multi-layered, postmodern masterpiece, which takes such staggering liberties with narrative structure that it makes an Italo Calvino novel appear straightforward by comparison. Fundamentally, the bulk of Problem Sleuth’s narrative takes the form of a series of clever, logic stretching ‘puzzles’ that would leave even the most ardent point and clicker scrambling for a walkthrough (in one of many moments of self-reflexivity Problem Sleuth does just that, and at another point Ace Dick finds a code machine that allows him to restore a later point in the game, skipping a particularly fiendish puzzle and cloning himself in the process). It is this affectionate homage to the genre, the act of using and abusing its tropes in such a brilliantly innovative fashion, along with its spirit of independence that makes Problem Sleuth such a perfect segue into the Pixelhunter adventure.

So have a read. Get inspired. I’ll be pointing out some more things to click on soon.

Thanks to my housemate Thom Haley for putting together the Pixelhunter logo.

It all starts with a man trapped in his office…

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