The classic point and click adventure game genre has always been a favorite of mine since I first learned to read and play videogames. Recently, I played through, with the help of a walkthrough at times, a new entry from Headup Games called Trüberbrook. As you might have guessed, the story takes place in Germany, and with a pretty wacky premise at that.
You’ll play the role of Hans Tannhauser, a quantum physics professor who has won a vacation from a lottery that he did not realize he entered. The vacation sends him off to a very remote mountainside town in 1967 Germany known as Trüberbrook. Upon arriving, you find the quiet, nearly-empty town a bit strange, and the people in it as well. The first night of Hans’ stay is an eventful one that sees him robbed, and his quantum physics notebook taken from his room. The police are days away. Left to explore the small town, you encounter an anthropologist woman who is also from out of town and is trying to get to a former ritual site near Trüberbrook. To get there, she needs to repair a cable car system to traverse the mountaintops, and Hans quickly finds himself pursuing this same goal.
In working towards the reparation of the cable car, Hans learns about the Millennium Corporation, a bullish company that came in, took over the mining business in Trüberbrook, and then unceremoniously bailed out, leaving the once thriving town for dead. Their presence still lingers, it seems, as the people and circumstances you encounter as Hans get stranger. It’s hard to say much about it without dropping spoilers, and given that the game is small and short on content, I hesitate to say too much. I can say that I found the characters and the story, and its sci-fi silliness mildly interesting, but nothing on the scale of a classic Lucasarts or Sierra title.
Shifting gears for a bit, the presentation of Trüberbrook is impressive. The hand-drawn artwork looks excellent and is a strong point of the experience. I played the game with German audio and English subtitles, and I thought the voice-acting was very well done this way. There were a few spelling goofs in the subtitles, but I don’t consider that a big deal. There is little to no music in the game, though there is a painfully long sequence of a few minutes that you have to sit through towards the end of the game where you help a singer through his song. It might have been some kind of Kickstarter goal or just some attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor, but it didn’t do much for me.
Solid presentation aside, there’s not a whole heck of a lot to do in Trüberbrook. The number of NPCs, dialog options, and scenes/backgrounds is pretty limited. The interface is modernized and streamlined. You can view the inventory by holding I, but you never actually manually interact with the inventory. You can’t even hover over the items you have to get a description oddly enough. Instead, any objects that you can interact with in the world will have the appropriate icon, and if you have the right item(s), you just have to click it — no guess work at all, and it makes brute forcing through a puzzle easy because you can’t guess wrong as long as you have found the item. As has become customary in the genre over the last several years, you can press the spacebar to highlight all items in a room that you can interact with, although this is not the case in a special room where you have to work with the other main NPC to highlight markings on cavern walls with her flashlight. Interaction options are kept streamlined and to the point, be they objects in the world, conversations with NPCs, or inventory related gameplay.
Despite the conciseness of the overall experience, I found myself alt-tabbing out to a walkthrough during the latter third of the game as I was running out of steam/interest in the plot. I can’t necessarily place a finger on why, but I just wasn’t invested enough in the story or characters, and had fumbled through enough sketchy logic puzzles by then that I didn’t want to deal with that much more. This isn’t the first point and click I have done this with, and I don’t suspect it will be the last, but for me there comes a time in most of these games where I’m more interested in the outcome than I am in spending the time grinding out the solutions. I appreciated the endgame twist that Trüberbrook offers up to players, and it’s one of the reasons that I will say this game is worth playing through; but, it does not rank among the better point and clicks I’ve played.
Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of the genre, appreciate fine artwork and want to experience a fairly interesting story, Trüberbrook is worth a look, just go in with expectations in check.
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