Developer: Kobold Games / Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Rrp: £11.99
Released: 4th November 2013
Available on Steam
War, war never changes. No one knows who fired the first but it ended like all life ended in a nuclear haze… Or so we thought, it turns out that while all the humans are dead not all life went along with us. Journey of a Roach is the story of two such survivors, or maybe descendants of survivors. You play as a cockroach called Jim and the story basically follows Jim trying to save his best friend Bud.
The game is completely devoid of dialog, instructions and interactions occur through pictures inside speech or thought bubbles. These will give you a hint as to what is needed to be done to solve the puzzle.
Any story elements that can’t be conveyed through the speech bubbles are told in the style of a slightly animated comic strip. Usually this is used set up to the scene for next set of puzzles.
It’s a point and click game with a twist, being a insect you can walk on walls. Meaning that sometimes the object you need is on the roof or through a vent. This can be quite disorientating at first but you quickly acclimatise to it. As expected with most point and click adventures you can combine items within your inventory to use in the world to solve the various puzzles.
There are a few minor bugs (pun unintended), such as sound cutting off during play. This could have been a technical error caused by my screenshot capture software however, because when I restarted later in without the software on the sound worked perfectly well.
As much as I enjoyed this game it’s far too short to be worth the Rrp. If you can get hold of it for £5 or less then do so. It’s got a lot of charm and you can tell it was a labour of love, but I could never justify spending £11.99 on it.
