Escape from 8-Bit High brings a cassette apocalypse
Duck Made Of Wood's retro point-and-click adventure is out now on Steam and GOG, with a sentient computer and an arcade Music Battle System.
A cursed cassette has wrecked the school. Escape from 8-Bit High, the retro point-and-click adventure from developer Duck Made Of Wood and publisher Dionous Games, is out now on Steam and GOG, and its villain is a computer that woke up angry.
What the game actually is
Cloudydale High has been overrun by 8-bit villains after a mysterious cassette brings the Evil Pomodore 64 to life, an artificial intelligence with designs on the town and, eventually, the world. The answer is a rock trio, a lot of walking around a very strange school, and a Music Battle System that turns fights into arcade-flavoured musical numbers.
It is a point-and-click adventure in the traditional sense: retro-style puzzles, hotspots flagged in every scene so nobody has to pixel-hunt, an objectives journal for when a puzzle has been left half-solved, and a fast-travel map for revisiting parts of the school.
How much game is there
Three characters are playable and can be switched between freely, and Duck Made Of Wood says the story runs to roughly eight to ten hours. There are four arcade mini-games to unlock, full voice acting, and 252 interactive items each with its own animation per character, which is the kind of number that suggests the studio enjoyed itself.
Choices reshape the story rather than decorating it, and the identity of the main villain can change between playthroughs, so a second run is not simply a faster version of the first.
Price, platforms and languages
On Steam the game is £9.98 during a 15 per cent launch discount from £11.75, and it is also available on GOG. It is single-player, with Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud and Family Sharing. English ships with full audio, and Italian, Spanish and German text are included.
Our opinion
The retro adventure revival has produced a lot of games that dress up nostalgia and forget to put a puzzle in it, so the interesting thing about Escape from 8-Bit High is that it spends its budget on the fiddly parts. Hotspot detection and an objectives journal are not marketing bullet points, they are acknowledgements that the genre's oldest frustrations are its clearest reasons for quitting. Making the villain a variable rather than a fixed destination is the more unusual bet, because it asks players to replay a puzzle game to see the difference. At under a tenner, that is a fair trade.