As people, we tend to generally remember the good experiences in life and bury the bad ones deep down. Because of this, nostalgia is a powerful drug. It transports us back to a time that maybe wasn’t so great but that we remember as being great. For a lot of people my age, that time frame is the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s. That time period was key in developing tastes in music, movies, literature, and of course video games for us. It was the time of the Apple IIe, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, and of course, the Nintendo Entertainment System. And, it was the time of the adventure game. Games like King’s Quest and Maniac Mansion began to shape what would eventually become a huge corner of the gaming market in the early-to-mid 90s PC arena. Lucas Arts and Sierra Interactive would battle it out for adventure game supremacy only to fail to adjust to the shifting market and be forgotten about (by most gamers) as a genre for years until Telltale revitalized it to huge success with 2012’s The Walking Dead. Since 2012, the adventure game market has regained its foothold (even in the wake of Telltale’s collapse) and we continue to get well done adventure games on the regular.
Unusual Findings is an adventure game in the vein of the old Lucas Arts/Sierra Interactive mold. And it wears it’s inspirations proudly on its sleeves. We’re talking pixelated visuals, obtuse puzzle solutions (although admittedly not as obtuse as some in the games it is inspired by), and quirky writing that may or may not work for you. And the game is steeped in 80s nostalgia with a ton of visual and dialog based callbacks. Visually the game looks like a retro game and considering it’s 80s themed, the pixelated style (which arguably is a bit overdone in indie games today) looks and feels great. The soundtrack, while a bit repetitive over the 5-6 hours it took me to complete, is also perfectly fitting. It all sets a great vibe for the game.
One thing I loved best about the game was the movie posters. The film titles have been changed in this alternate universe but the posters are awesome pixel representations of classic films like Return of the Jedi, Back to the Future, Scarface, and They Live. And the voiced descriptions each have is a love letter to these films, for example a poster that calls the film The Black Crystal but looks like The Dark Crystal has Vinny explaining how it is a live action film but completely done with puppets and his adoring delivery about it is lovely. It’s not just 80s movies the game loves but all general pop culture of the time. There’s band posters and arcade games. There is a great dig at the awful Top Gun NES game and how we’d blow in the carts to make them work. And it would all be a bit much if it didn’t click but fortunately it does.
The name, Unusual Findings, has the feel of Stranger Things and you can see that developer, Epic Llama, was definitely trying to invoke that property here but like Stranger Things, the game is set up similarly to every 80s kid adventure. A group of mischievous but ultimately good kids who roll around their small town on their bikes somehow get involved in an event far outside their capacity and ultimately have to save themselves, their small town, and the world as well. It’s not nearly as dark as Stranger Things can get and that was a great choice. It’s lighthearted, nostalgic fun.
Taking place in the 80s, the game kicks off with you playing a Space Invaders clone. The game glitches out and we are given a brief dialog between Vinny (the player character) and his Dad who has come in to yell at you because you are grounded. Regardless of your dialog choices, you will remain grounded, which means no music, television, and of course, no video games. After he takes away your game cartridges and for some reason locks Vinny’s room, you hear a knocking at your window. You don’t need to check the sound right away but there’s not much reason to wait. Once you navigate to the window and open it, we get a new screen where Vinny’s friend Nick attempts to convince you to sneak out and go to another friend’s house because he has a descrambler and you may be able to watch some adult channels. This all really resonates with me because the cable descrambler was a thing that was talked about in grade school in hushed tones. You wanted to get in good with the kid that had one, so they’d invite you over. More often than not though, the descrambler kid could never get it to work when you were finally invited over. Anyway…
The escape from your room requires you to do some screen searching and light puzzle solving. Fortunately, Vinny’s bedroom isn’t very big so it’s easy to search everything and find what is needed. But even finding what is needed isn’t enough to escape. You’ll need to combine items to make other items and like the games it is inspired by, the item combos don’t always make the most sense. To the game’s credit, it establishes early on that sometimes things aren’t the most logical and if you ever get stuck combining shit together is a good way to maybe open up a solution. Another piece of this opening area is getting introduced to dialog choices between Vinny and his friends.
These binary dialog choices impact how Vinny’s friends behave down the line and certain decisions can impact future areas of the game causing puzzle solutions to be different. For instance Vinny and his friends are being confronted by a group of guards, the game gives you the option of telling your friends to escape while you hold them off or declaring every man for themselves. If you play the hero, Vinny’s friends will be willing to help him later and thus provide a solution to a future puzzle. If you Play it selfishly, they won’t help you later and you’ll need to find a different solution to that same future puzzle. While the game’s overall narrative doesn’t change much (there are however, three different endings), this binary choice system does offer some replayability to give a slightly tweaked experience. I did find it a bit jarring though that the game does seem to lock you out of certain paths once you make a move even when logically it shouldn’t but then again, that is classic adventure gaming.
One thing that I did find frustrating about the gameplay though is that often times the environments are so dense with interactive objects that navigating Vinny through an environment could become difficult. Vinny and his friends move by pointing on a space and clicking there but the environments aren’t just one screen so you’ll often need to navigate left to right and trying to move from the middle of the environment to the end can result in you accidently clicking an interactive object. And if you are making your way through an area over and over again as you search for items or try new potential solutions, clicking accidently can happen more times than you’d want. It is certainly not a dealbreaker but a frustrating quirk.
While I understand not wanting to judge books by their covers, in this case, Unusual Findings is exactly what it appears to be. If you never liked old school adventure games, Unusual Findings isn’t going to change your opinion on that front as it generally sticks to the classic mold from 30+ years ago. However, if you have a soft spot for the genre, this can be a delightful trip back to the 80s.
4*
This review was written with material provided from the developer for the Xbox Series X. For more on our review process, please read here.
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