I started playing point and click games such as The Secret of Monkey Island and King’s Quest IV from a young age, their myriad of sprawling and sometimes abstract puzzles required me to think creatively and work out the constraints of the game. If basic logic failed, then a brute force solution was always available, something easily doable by a kid with nothing but time on their hands. I honestly believe these aspects helped build me into the software developer I am today, someone willing to think out-of-the-box but also do the dirty work when required.
These games, especially the Monkey Island series, also firmly established my sense of humor as pun-heavy, non-sequiturish, and willing to gross-out. The first time I watched Guybrush Threepwood shove an extra large item down his pants changed me forever.
Heir of the Dog, the new adventure from Tall Story Games, brings back both the classic point and click gameplay along with its knack for outrageous sight gags; I’ve never seen so much pixelated dog piss in my life. Let’s get cleaning up.
The hook in Heir of the Dog is pretty great: you can transform into a dog at night! It immediately breaks up the puzzle-space into day and night sections, and also replaces the Talk verb with Sniff, along with placing or removing restrictions on your movement around the map. It’s a clever conceit that I was immediately excited for after solving the game’s opening puzzles (where you mostly play as a human/dog chimera, as weird as it sounds!), and thankfully there are very few restrictions on when and where you can transform. Of course, swapping to your dog form does change the environment to night.
Backing up a bit, you play as Cummerbund Bandersnatch in Victorian England who comes across his inventor uncle’s laboratory in a distressed state. With zero hesitation, Cummerbund downs a concoction that turns him into the aforementioned monster and has probably done something similar to his uncle. The standard array of point and click verbs has been smartly reduced down to “Look At”, “Pick Up”, “Talk/Sniff”, and “Use”, with your inventory visible next to them. Thankfully the size of your inventory barely ever exceeds ten items, so the amount of “use X on Y” is graciously reduced. Cummerbund also has the helpful habit of losing now-irrelevant items immediately after using them the last time.
Sniffing as a dog also feels like a genius level video game verb implementation. Not only can you sniff any object in the game, prompting Bandy (another dog’s cute nickname for our hero) to deliver a clever and sometimes helpful remark, but it’s how you initiate a conversation with another dog: by literally sniffing their butt. There’s a little puzzle that introduces this concept where as a human you have to get another dog to reposition themselves so that your dog-self can sniff their butt through a grate in the wall. At first I had no idea why I was attempting to get the dog to move, but it made me laugh in the end.
There’s probably a few more moments throughout Heir of the Dog like this than I like though. Times where I identified a puzzle, could work out a solution, but didn’t know what actual problem it was trying to solve. The game offers a high level checklist of things to do, but lacks any other sort of hint system. There’s an orb you can press and hold a button on in the corner of the screen to identify important objects on screen, but it sure would have been nice to just make this a toggle. While the genre’s infamous pixel hunting isn’t egregious in Heir, there were a few times I cocked my head in confusion over a puzzle.
Heir of the Dog features full voice acting and lots of clever double entendres, but I found some of the conversations extremely lengthy and lacking in either story or puzzle substance. A lot of the characters in the game just love to ramble, and you’re required to exhaust every dialog option in case the last one is part of the critical path. This isn’t the end of the world, but I found myself wanting to get back to the puzzles and gameplay already. The talky scenes also often repeat themselves if you need to retry a challenge, such as getting hired at the dog pound or entering a tug-o-eel contest. You can skip dialog, but that also doesn’t feel as snappy as it could.
I’ve harped on some of its game design but I think Heir really excels at some of its locked room style puzzles. The opening of the game is a nice example of this, but there’s a traveling puzzle midway through where you’re stuck on a hot air balloon and have to navigate to a specific spot on the map. It’s tough but feels very rewarding once you figure it out. There’s also this insane flea circus puzzle that had me simultaneously cursing and applauding Tall Story Games; and the beach password made me feel like the smartest guy in the room once I worked it out.
Heir of the Dog took me about 12 hours to complete, the game came close to running out of juice, but the last suite of puzzles amps up the options quite a bit and reinvigorates an adventure that feels like maybe it should have wrapped up a few hours ago. It’s a fun game that isn’t afraid to be crude and gross, while also rightfully lampshading that the main character is in love with a dog. I could see a bit trimmed here or there, but on this 29th anniversary of The Curse of Monkey Island, I have no hesitation in recommending it to fans of old school point and click adventures.
I received a Steam key for Heir of the Dog courtesy of the developer.
