Review Duty and Beyond Developer: Wandering Adventures Publisher: N/A Genre: Adventure Release Date: July 2006 Platform: Review by Ricardo Pautassi May 1, 2007		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Duty and Beyond (D&B) is an independent, freeware point and click adventure made by Wandering Adventures employing Adventure Game Studio (AGS). It has been awarded with two 2006 AGS awards: best gameplay and best puzzles.

D&B is straight point and click adventure, deep to its roots. Move from one room to the other, collect wrench, rope, pearl (and not forget your must-be-in-your inventory pickaxe, tape and penny-sized coin), talk to character, guess what he/she wants, combine inventory, come back to character, get something in return, go for another path, start again. Sounds boring or just another installment of an overused recipe? Actually, it is not. Even those who are not particularly fond of this particular type of sub-genre (hey, I’m talking to you, the one playing “Aura: Fate of the Ages”) will find the game at least entertaining, if not completely addictive. Two main reasons underlie this statement: (1) design, extremely good game design and (2) Pixelated, low-resultion graphs, yet attractive and original art and general aesteshics.

The game runs in a glorious 320 x 200 resolution (at 32-bit color) and most of the time the clickable area involves a tiny square in the middle of the screen. Sure, first impression is not particularly jaw-dropping, but as time passes it is very difficult not to become fond of the graphs. What is the secret? Consistency. Throughout its course, screen after screen, the game is faithful to this style. The colour palette is really charming too: strong, warm reds, yellows and green, lots of green borders. Inventory items are good examples of the path taken by the author in terms of graphs. First, the bad news: most of the content of the inventory can be barely recognizable as representative of any “real world” object. That is, a a square blue thingie is supossedly a “blue tape”, while a concentrincal brown line is a “rope”. But again (and here comes the good news), drawings are not ugly in themselves and they share style. So, soon you became familiar with the idea that, at least in this game, the items are intended to be just icons an not real world representations. You will find many animations, too. Tiny animations maybe, but they add a lot to the general atmosphere. Have to climb down a rope? You’ll see your character moving down. Walking in the woods? Butterfiles move here an there.

The story works just fine, but is far from being flawless. Succinctly, you are a pizza delivery guy who is in his way to do your job in a remote mansion. When arriving, you realize that, in order to finish your duty, you’ll have to complete a rather complex scavenger-like hunt in the puzzle-loaded mansion. Oddly enough, you stumble upon coworkers and colleagues as well, all of them also involved in your situation. Granted, it’s not really deep, complez nor tought-provoking. There are a couple of attempts to create tension and the feeling that there might be, indeed, an overhanging story. Sadly, these efforts fall short since (1) Game’s lenght is quite important and more often than not these bits of story remain isolated in the middle of big chunks of fast-paced puzzle solving and exploration and (2) The finale is extremely disappointing and feels more like a rushed attempt to wrapp up the game. D&B is divided in theme-based zones that should be quite familiar for the seasoned adventurer (medieval village, egypt-like temple, see later for details). You have to explore them, collect items and solve (mainly inventory-based) puzzles. There are plenty of places/rooms to visit in each region and characters to interact with.

Puzzles in D&B run the gamut from incredibly simple to being fully embebbed in shrouded logic. Most of the time are fair, tough. As said, inventory-based are, expectable, the most abundant. Riddles and guess-the-combination also make their, sometimes notorious, appeareance. Interestingly, here and there you will be required to interact with the enviroment to avoid obstacles. While not innovative, the latter fit really well with the platfform-like design of the game. Most, but not all, are hinted. Yet, I felt that objects in the -- most of the time highly crammed -- inventory lacked useful descriptions, which would had helped winding up the game.

Now, some concerns in regards with a specific section. There is a rather lengthy part where you have to maneuver a mini-sub. Not only the movement of this apparatus is quite clumsy but also the layout of this part of the game is get-object, go back, give object to character to “unlock” certain path in the place you had been before, all wrapped in a sometimes warped logic. This is just a an example to show that sometimes D&B asks for too much backtracking and the general design of the gameworld does not get along with this.

Specifically, the layout of the gameworld, with its many rooms and doors can be sometimes a bit daunting and it was sort of frustrating to have to resort to the walkthrough just to realize that I had missed a certain area and, hence, a necessary item. In fact maybe there are too much rooms, many of them alike, which springs the suggestion that a little bit of condensation of places wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Also, pixel-hunting makes its appearance here and there, so be warned. And it’s one of the worst pixel-hunting I can remember from my gaming experience (don’t get nervous “Men in Black” from the mid-90’s, your bomb timed-puzzle that can only be deactivated by clicking a single pixel won’t be surpassed). Sometimes vital hotspots are completely hidden in the background making their finding difficult even after checking the walktrough. More often than not the only solution is to carefully and and slowly sweep the screen with the mouse. But truth be said, sometimes –yet, not always-- pixel-hunting seems to be a rather necessary side effect of the graphic style and if so, it’s a good trade-off.

The game shines when capturing the spirit of some old point and click games, those that privileged exploration and puzzles over story and character development. Specifically, the game is divided in “worlds” connected to the mansion where your quest starts. In each of these worlds you have to collect some item supposedly conducive to the big finale. The whole concept is by no means innovative, but works fine. Each world feels definitely distinctive. First you go to a submarine filled with funny alien people whose society seems to be founded upon bureaucracy. Yet, things get better in the second world, your run of the mill medieval-scenario with castles and goblins. Here are tons of items to collect and characters to interact. And the puzzles are fresh and inspired. They are still mainly inventory based, but now they make use of every play in the book: character interaction, item colecction and combination, interaction with the enviroment, riddle-like problems. They are not very difficult, not very easy, so, a great chapter for any adventurer. Later you will also have to visit an egiptian temple and.a London full of conspiracies.

For the one familiar with the AGS world, many references are inserted, including the search for blue cups (the AGS logo) as well as references to other games, notably Spooks and the Trilby saga. Duty and Beyond is by all means a tong-and-cheek product, making fun of itself and the genre all the time. In one section, when trying to examine an amulet, the main character will say “It’s an amulet. Due to the low resolution I can’t really describe it more”. Yeah, it’s funny. Of course, the only problem being that the low-res also helps the pixel-hunting to be an even worse nightmare.

Total gameplay time reached – at least for this reviewer, not very skilled when it comes to solving puzzles -- around 9 hours, which is a fairly decent amount of time and that’s without having completed all the side-quests. Because D&B also offers optional puzzles and quests, a refresing and not very usual idea in adventure games. According to the author, completion of such optional paths allows watching and optional ending as well as, of course, getting all the points. Indeed, the game features a Sierra-style point system with a sound signal reminiscent of Gabriel Knight I. I found this feature quite interesting, serving not only as a reward that pushes you further in the game, but, more importantly, also works as a sort of highlighter, helping focus attention in relevant items or pieces of information. Also, neither bugs nor dead-ends were noted while playing D&B.

In summary, D&B is a game not to miss. Not only for its freeware status and its friendly download size (4.3 MB) but mainly because you would be losing a well-designed old school game. It may be the case, though, that you will have to fill some of the holes of the story with your imagination. But even after this drawback, I can easily recommend the game to any and every adventurer. The game can be downloaded free of charge from the archives of AGS and receives a solid B from this reviewer.

Final Grade: B
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