1954: Alcatraz

With the sheer weight of media attention it has inspired, Tim Schafer’s Broken Age looks set to make 2014 the year of the adventure game, shining a welcome spotlight onto a genre that has begun to thrive once more in recent years. 1954: Alcatraz looks set to be one of the games that will benefit from this renewed interest in a genre many in mainstream gaming once thought dead or little more than a trifling novelty.

Much like Joe, one of the protagonists of 1954: Alcatraz, who finds himself imprisoned in the iconic high security island prison after a botched armoured truck heist, whilst the beat poetry scene of San Francisco’s North Beach area explodes outside his cell window, adventure games never truly went away. This is especially true of Germany, where Alcatraz’s developer/publisher Daedalic Entertainment are based, which oddly became a haven for the genre that had seen its roots in once big American studios like Lucas Arts and Sierra. As the bluster of the triple A space became more intense, the genre turned into a refuge for those wanting to return to a simpler age, when the technical and narrative heights of gaming could be expressed by a few dozen screens of beautifully rendered scenery, filled with eccentric characters and puzzles, and navigated at the player’s own pace with a single click of the mouse.

The mature, gritty tone injected by Mocsy’s writing, which could so easily have backfired any number of times, helps to build the kind of realistic and nuanced world that fans of Boardwalk Empire should lap up.

1954: Alcatraz lives up to this spirit of the golden age of adventure games and then some, presenting a rich world filled with quirky puzzles and characters, whilst also promising multiple endings based on decisions you make in the game (an essential ingredient for games following the success of Tell Tale’s The Walking Dead). Whilst Joe stews in jail, attempting to assemble components and information for an escape, his wife Christine is tasked with tracking down the real loot from the heist, based on a few clues whispered by Joe during visiting hour, before the mob can close in on her. Although a certain degree of suspension of disbelief is required when thinking of how Joe had the foresight to scatter so many keys behind so many obstacles, this very ‘gamey’ trope is largely smoothed over by some nice puzzle design, which benefits from having character interaction at its heart.

This is, after all, a story inspired by hardboiled novels, notorious for their webs of characters with competing motives. So, as the sassy Christine bribes, seduces and blackmails her way around the North Beach scene in search of Joe’s ill gotten gains, she encounters an eclectic range of characters including night club singers, crooked detectives, highly strung writers, and Chinese restaurant owners, all with their own secrets and points of leverage. One puzzle, for instance, sees you convincing a young writer to forgive his older gay lover, and later pictures of the same couple being married are used, against Christine’s own moral judgement, to blackmail the priest who conducted the ceremony.

The Game doesn’t always hit the mark with its somewhat subversive themes, but it does a damn sight better than most. Joe and Christine in particular seem a believable couple, even though Mocsy was keen to express that their marriage is on the rocks due to Joe’s arrest (whilst controlling Christine early on it’s possible to cheat on Joe with a fellow beatnik writer). We’re reminded that their relationship itself is one that flies in the face of social mores, given that Joe is black, a theme rarely tackled by videogames. The mature, gritty tone injected by Mocsy’s writing, which could so easily have backfired any number of times, helps to build the kind of realistic and nuanced world that fans of Boardwalk Empire should lap up.

Given the strong local flavour of the setting it’s not surprising to hear that the game has been in the works since 2009 when Gene Mocsy of Irresponsible Games, himself an inhabitant of San Francisco, became interested in the rich history of the bay area and the Beat poetry scene of North Beach in particular. Mocsy is no stranger to adventure games having previously worked on Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island following his departure from EA, where he spent several years working on games like James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing and The Godfather, before deciding to pursue his love of adventure games. The result of all this research was a prototype called Alcatraz, which was submitted to the San Francisco International Game Developers Association competition, where it was recognised and taken on by Daedalic Entertainment, a company who have been steadily building a reputation for themselves as publishers of highly polished point and clicks. This is the latest in a long line of good bets from Daedalic, who were also responsible for helping Marco Hüllen bring his wonderful fable A Whispered World to fruition after years in production limbo.

Without the pressure to scale back the puzzles for accessibility sake, as Broken Age arguably has, the game will surely fit any adventure game enthusiast’s diet. That said the puzzles, whilst occasionally tricky, do have a clear internal logic that prevents them from being obtuse. For instance, when getting into a mobster’s safe you have to figure out that the code relates to the hourglass measurements of a particular club performer he’s carrying a torch for, and a quick visual comparison nets the correct code. The game gives you just enough to make you feel smart for solving the puzzle, without being wilfully obscure or frustratingly simple.

It’s becoming embarrassingly clichéd to praise Daedalic’s games for looking stylistically gorgeous, but if that’s the case then throw me in the slammer, because I am guilty as charged. The game’s lovingly rendered polygonal personalities blend seamlessly with the many detailed painted backdrops, bringing the locale and the era effortlessly to life by drawing from a deep well of hardboiled fiction and noir aesthetics. The game’s mobsters are decked in pin striped suits and pork pie hats, whilst Christine’s sultry bohemian style could give Nico Collard a run for her money. Yet even with this magpie picking of genre tropes, the game’s inhabitants sit just the right side of caricature. Not all the English dialogue had been fully implemented in the build I played, but even so there was enough to recognise its high quality, and the evocative jazz era soundtrack by Pedro Macedo Camacho is likely to be a big selling point, building up the atmosphere nicely. 1954: Alcatraz, which is already out in Germany and is currently being localised, is shaping up to be a very interesting game indeed.