Trüberbrook

[Warlock-]

 

Trüberbrook is that guy or girl you'd instantly swipe right on Tinder. This mystery adventure game, set in late 1960s rural Germany, grabs your attention immediately with its beautifully detailed graphics. Designers btf have hand-built every bit of backdrop in the game from scratch as a miniature scale model, then captured with a 3D scanner and only then with the game's animated characters. The effect, of a night's sky or rugged forest where every star or tree is unique and meticulously brought to life, is stunning. Like many a hastily swiped hottie, however, the game never quite delivers as much on some of its other elements as it does on its looks.

Fortunately there's enough witty dialogue and puzzles to solve along the way that it's only at the end of that chapter that things go from casual fun to overly complicated. You play young American physicist Hans Tannhauser, who has arrived at the title German village having won the trip in a lottery he never even knew he entered - a problem we're all in favor of having. The developers have a lot of fun showing what a fish out of water the scientist is in the mountainous Germanic setting.

I wanted to click on every little object, whether the knight's armor in the middle of town square, a cinema poster or even a simple hanging bucket to discover more about this weird, nearly-deserted place and hear Hans's reaction to it, as they never disappointed. Justin Beard, the voice actor for Hans, does a great job of capturing the physicist's gentle American bemusement.

Being a scientist, Hans also has a trust in Dictaphone, on which he records the reflections of the world around him. I enjoyed "collecting" these observations on different objects as I was pottered around, feeling like a real teacher, and you can even play them back again if you want, in recorded sound quality. Tannhauser eventually arrives at the wonderfully titled Pension Waldeslust, his hostel, but it does not take off the warm welcome he was expecting. In the middle of the night someone sneaks into his room and steals his precious documents. With the help of straight-talking fellow scientist Gretchen, also in Trüberbrook for his own research, Hans decides to embark on an adventure to uncover the thief, get back his work, and along the way discover the mysteries of this quaint yet secretive village.

Throughout the journey, usually alone but occasionally accompanied by Gretchen, Hans comes across some delightfully oddball characters. You chat with the village's loonies by clicking on them to bring up a verb coin, which in turn brings up various dialogue strands, all fully voiced. With so many selections, Trüberbrook is thankfully the good kind of adventure game where you know what line of dialogue you're supposed to choose, but you go through every option anyway because the writing is such that it's fun to have a natter with everybody about everything.

Trude, the big bosomed blonde hostel receptionist with a penchant for massage rods is a particular highlight, as is Barbarossa 2000, a lonely robot who just wants a friend. There's an occasional smattering of "I'm Bobbin, are you my mother" and other LucasArts references sprinkled in here and there, but really the script is so well written that in-jokes are not needed for a laugh.