Summary: 3.5/5.0
Detective Gallo is a point&click comic-noir adventure that is entirely hand-illustrated and hand-animated, and whose protagonist is a feathered and grumpy private eye struggling with a very tricky case, bizarre characters, and puzzles that will put his insight and patience to the test.
Developer: Footprints Games
Genre: Point & Click Adventure
Release Date: May 30, 2018
Platform: Nintendo Switch (Also available on PC & PS4)
Price: $14.99
Environment
Detective Gallo is beautiful, and an excellent example of a game with careful, thoughtful art direction and execution. The game is hand-illustrated and hand-animated. The music is also fantastic and instrumental in establishing the noir atmosphere (pun intended). Gallo's world is rich and colorful, filled with sharp contrasts and quirky characters. With a few exceptions, the UI is intuitive and unobtrusive. While it might be easy to overlook a hotspot, it's easy to identify what you're looking at in the environment, which is not always true of point & click adventures. The developers were able to achieve an environment that is not only practical for interaction, but thematically appropriate and pleasing to look at, which is not an easy accomplishment.
Mechanics
The technical execution of Detective Gallo is its weakest area. One primary example of this is the control mapping. The primary action button is used for navigating, selecting inventory items, starting conversations with suspects, etc. However, when it comes to interacting with objects in the environment, that button is used for picking up objects, not looking at them. So I found myself continuously picking up objects without knowing what they are, and then having to go back into the inventory to hear the item description because I used the wrong interaction unintentionally. Particularly on small screens, it's incredibly easy to miss a hotspot when there are two in close proximity - for example, two hotspots on the same object. Even using his Gallo sense to identify the hotspots, it's easy to think you're interacting with one, when you're actually interacting with the other. This happened to me when I was attempting to melt a wax seal on a barbecue grill.
The dialogue in this game is subject to more bugs than anything else. As I explored the first crime scene, the NPC kept crying and repeating the same line of dialogue repeatedly and over any of Gallo's commentary of clues. (Although, at one point, the NPC responded to Gallo's commentary on the crime scene, which was a great touch.) Unfortunately, by finding a certain clue I inadvertently triggered the next phase of gameplay, without having finished all the available dialogue options. There were also several instances of random dialogue playing during the black load screens between environments. In addition, there is no consistent text placement for the subtitles in this game. Instead, they follow Detective Gallo around -- while cute, not particularly practical. They can be difficult to read over the colorfully illustrated backgrounds.
Most of the environments in Detective Gallo fit on one screen, but there are some cases where you must walk to the edge of the screen to see the rest of the environment. This would be fine if Gallo's walking speed wasn't excruciatingly slow. There is a mechanic in place to speed up travel between environments, but exploring a large scene, or traveling through a large scene, dramatically impedes the momentum of the game. This is especially frustrating when you miss a small-but-progression-blocking conversation or hotspot.
Characters
The cast of characters in Detective Gallo is quirky & interesting, but far from groundbreaking. And perhaps that's okay. There's the eccentric, rich client. The obsessive love "interest." The damsel in distress. The sassy bartender. The gruff undercover informant. You get the idea. The most divergent casting decision is that Gallo's assistant/sidekick is a cactus in a world of birds... And that Gallo has a cardboard cutout of his cactus to intimidate visitors in his office. Gallo himself is a cocky protagonist (again, pun intended) with hundreds of rules to guide his investigation.
Narrative
It's fun to click on everything you can find in the game just to hear the narration. Gallo's commentary is critical and funny, and includes a number of references to genre cliches, but is inconsistent. Gallo alternates between calling someone a "pain in the ass" and awkwardly formal thoughts that he "must go to the" next location. As for the investigation itself, it's a compelling narrative with plenty of twists and turns to keep you engaged in the story. What the game lacks in creativity regarding character stereotypes, it makes up for in the resolution to the mystery, even if the key to uncovering the truth is introduced abruptly with no foreshadowing. However, unlike most mystery games, I found that I didn't actually mind that the clues weren't necessarily there for me to figure out the solution on my own before it was revealed. In fact, i found that I wasn't actively trying to solve the mystery. I was just along for the ride. A very wacky ride.
Conclusion
Detective Gallo is clearly a project full of passion and deliberate well-made decisions regarding plot and artistic direction. It's definitely worth picking up for any fans of the mystery or point & click genre. However, it could absolutely benefit from some polish, particularly on platforms with a controller as opposed to a mouse. We've seen examples of this being done on console in a way that doesn't impede gameplay, so it's not an issue with the platform, but this particular game. Overall, Detective Gallo is a good story in a great environment - I just wish the same attention was paid to the technical execution as the rest of the game. Although, I'll take a great story with technical difficulties over a polished but incoherent narrative any day.
