Point and click adventures go way back, and to this day many of the Lucasarts classics remain some of my favorite titles of all time. I haven’t played them all obviously, and there have been many in the first person and 3D era from the last fifteen years or so that I skipped, but when I saw the screenshots and trailer for A Golden Wake (AGW) I knew I had to check it out, and I’m sure glad I did.
The story, which is the heart and soul of point-and-clicks, starts in the early 1920s and ends in the mid-30’s. You are Alfred Banks, aka Alfie, a very successful real estate salesman in New York. You wear your family name with pride, and things are generally going very well for you. But one otherwise typical day you are figuratively thrown under the bus by two of your colleagues. This results in you being fired, and you decide to make a major change — you decide to take your talents to south beach to partake in the rapidly growing land boom. With a bit of luck and some old fashion adventuring, you get your break and are able to meet with George Merrick, the mogul who is pioneering a huge development known as Coral Gables. He gives you several tasks as part of an extended job interview, and soon enough you’re on board. The next decade-plus of Alfie’s life are the center of a great story that sees the rise and fall of the land boom, Prohibition, the mob, and even the great hurricane of ’26.
The Golden Wake looks old school in that wonderful SCUMM engine kind of way, although some quick research suggests it was not created with SCUMM. It bears obvious semblance as far as artwork and controls go, but you won’t find the typical commands list in the HUD such as “Open” or “Push” or “Talk to.” Instead, you left click to interact with objects, including NPCs, and right click to examine them (which you can do from a distance, i.e., you don’t have to wait for your character to walk over to said object). Furthermore, if you move your cursor to the edges of the screen you will be prompted to exit the current “room.” Your inventory, which never grows beyond four or five objects and is often practically empty, is accessed simply by scrolling the cursor to the top of the screen which reveals the inventory and menu options, including save/load. You can save at anytime and in multiple spots, but this is the type of game that you don’t really need to use more than one save spot as there are no game-over scenarios (at least that I encountered). As expected, save and load times are instantaneous; a keyboard shortcut to quick-save would have been a nice touch, though.
So the controls and interface are about as accessible and ready-to-play as they get. Players also don’t have to worry about too much, if any, pixel-hunting. Objects that are relevant are generally readily visible so you won’t have to scrutinize every screen and move your cursor around “line-by-line,” which I’ve had to do in with some adventures in years past. Similarly, the pacing and puzzles are such that getting lost or stumped is rarely if at all a problem. As long as you due your due diligence of talking to all NPCs and examining all objects, things tend to fall in place very logically, perhaps a little too easily for genre veterans. I would consider myself very experienced in the genre, but honestly, it was refreshing to be able to play through this game almost like Hotel Dusk, that is, it’s more about enjoying the story and the atmosphere than it is figuring out some arcane puzzles.
Given what I’ve said thus far, you would be right to assume that, relatively, AGW is not a very long or challenging game, but I can’t complain. Given the time of year, the price of the game, and most importantly, the enjoyment I got from playing it, it was well worth the five or six hours it took. There are eighteen Steam achievements available too, many of which are awarded upon successfully completing the game’s most in-depth challenges or scenarios, which are certain key conversations. During these conversations, players are tasked with persuading the NPC. When these scenarios start, the NPC is shown from a first first person view. This is important because their body language is vital for knowing what direction to steer the conversation in next to get what you want out of them. In some cases, that might be to talk down a bank robber who’s pointing a gun at you, another time it might be to try to convince an important citizen to give a speech at your bosses big project unveiling. You can invoke Seller’s Intuition to help you out as well, but, you don’t really “fail” these conversations in the typical sense of the word, even if your outcome either isn’t ideal or what you had in mind.
These are by far the most interactive conversations you will partake in, others generally don’t leave you many options and more or less pilot themselves. Indeed, there are times in which you do have multiple choices of what tone or approach you want to take in a conversation, but in my experience the outcome doesn’t sway the story for long before it gets back into its groove.
And it’s quite a groove at that, on the whole, that I think you’ll find as I did with A Golden Wake. A big part of that comes from the wonderful instrumental soundtrack that is appropriate for the period, and the mood of the story. Voice-acting and the script are also very nicely done. Oddly, the voice of Merrick reminded me of one of the voices of a primary antagonist in the original Deus Ex, which is neither here nor there, but I couldn’t help but notice that. The artwork matches the retro gameplay style and, while I don’t know much about architecture and interior design from the ’20s, it felt authentic. That said, a lot of the rooms are a bit sparse on objects to either interact with or examine, but there are lots of paintings that you can select to look at for a brief, but ultimately useless, description. One other related note, during chapter transitions, a few months or even years might pass, and in those cases where you revisit an area again, sometimes little if anything at all has changed — so you’ll see the same NPCs wearing the same clothes and doing the same things, which felt a little bit lazy in an otherwise fine production.
And with that, to the summary…
