A surreal adventure game about being nice to people
The key to Dropsy is the hug system. Anyone you see – and some inanimate objects – can be hugged. Dropsy may look like the stuff of nightmares, but he has a heart of gold. Not everyone will want to hug him at first, though. First you have to make them like you by completing sidequests. For every successful hug, Dropsy pins a picture of the hugee to the wall above his bed.He’s a serial hugger, whose hunger for hugs cannot be sated, and the most unlikely videogame hero of the year.
Dropsy is also an adventure game, in the classic LucasArts mould. The stylish art is reminiscent of Day of the Tentacle, and the puzzles wouldn’t feel out of place in a Monkey Island game. But there’s a twist: there’s no dialogue in this adventure. Everything, even the menus, is communicated in picture form. Speech bubbles dance around characters’ heads, and they express themselves with icons. Early on, a fat yellow bird blocking your path has a love heart and a cake floating above it. And, handily, you’ve just picked up some cakes. You can guess the solution, but this is the simplest example. Later the icons get more abstract, and the puzzles more challenging as a result.
It’s a clever idea, because how you interpret these icons might give you a different impression of a character or situation than some other player would get. Your experience of the game will be different from a friend’s, which is an unusual approach to the usually dialogueheavy adventure genre.
Dropsy’s freely explorable world, which includes a whole town, is full of oddball characters, some of whom will instantly take a dislike to our hero. To get them on your side you’ll need to study the icons above their heads and figure out what they want. There’s also a day-and-night cycle, which determines when certain buildings are open and certain characters appear. The nightclub only opens at night (obviously), but when it does Dropsy can take to the dancefloor and twerk to the thumping beat.
Creator Jay Tholen is a musician, and the soundtrack to Dropsy is superb. Mellow Angelo-Badalamenti-inspired jazz and woozy psychedelic prog-rock give the game a strange, unique personality. David Lynch is an important creative touchstone for Tholen, and one trippy dreamworld sequence is reminiscent of the otherworldly Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. Dropsy is interesting both as a piece of art and as a point-and-click adventure. I’ve yet to explore the entirety of the huge world map, but what I’ve seen so far has been fascinating, weird, and peculiarly heartwarming. I’ve never been on a hugging spree in a game before, and that alone is worth celebrating. Andy Kelly