Feel like being naughty? Oh, hell, do you feel like just being .
. . . really, really wrong? You do? Then do I have the game for you.
Feel like slipping an entire restaurant full of people a roofie just
so you can steal something from your date’s purse? Feel like
tricking an on-the-wagon alcoholic into drinking booze so you can
steal his clothes? You’ve come to the right place.

At the risk of coming off like a non-objective Tell Tale Games fanboy,
I must report that the busy adventure studio has another big winner
in Hector: Badge of Carnage.

A word of warning: Do not play Hector while
your kids are in the room. This is not a criticism. Probably the most
inappropriate adventure game I’ve ever played, believe me when I tell
you that Hector is a riot. And when I say inappropriate, take me at
my word. This is a game that has fun with drug addiction, alcoholism,
murder, terrorism, prostitution, pornography, torture, animal testing,
farm animal abuse, regurgitation, and bathroom humor. This game would
make Stupid
Invaders and its Turd Museum eligible for the Disney Channel.

A collaboration of Straandlooper (an animation studio in Northern
Ireland which is evidently populated with maniacs of deliciously low
taste) and adventure game stalwart Tell Tale Games, Hector is another
one of those episode-based adventure games. This review will discuss
all three episodes of the game.

Full disclosure: I have special weakness for the look I call “Kinetic
Comic Strip.” It’s when animators take the conventions of a comic
book:: bright, simplified, 2D graphics, frames and panels, etc., and
merge them with the conventions of film and animation: dynamic parallax,
sound and music, and other types of animation. I’m a huge fan of this
approach, and I tend to really respond to it in games.²

I really liked this look in the recent A
New Beginning, and particularly loved its implementation
in the episodic Penny
Arcade Adventure: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.³

Hector takes place in the British town of Clappers
Wreake, a not-precisely- quaint place where the police department
is enthusiastic, if not always exactly competent. The title character
is a big, profane, but dedicated detective with a working class British
accent thick enough to use as wallpaper paste.

The adventure consists of three episodes, each anchored by a nasty
toilet that’s appalling in its own unique way.

The
toilet in first episode, We Negotiate With Terrorists,
is in a filthy jail cell, where our hero has been stuck for the night.
It’s a clever beginning, from a writing perspective, to begin with
your detective incarcerated like a common drunk. It also provides
a solid beginning, game-wise, as the locked room predicament is a
classic staple of classic third-person adventure games. Your first
set of puzzles consists of getting Hector the heck out of there.

The signature feature of these games is a gleeful tastelessness,
and it begins immediately: one of the important objects you need is
in the aforementioned filthy toilet.

Once you manage to spring Hector from his cell, he gets introduced
to the heart of the story: There’s a mad terrorist holding the city
hostage. He’s armed with a sniper rifle, with which he has accumulated
a pile (literally) of cop corpses. Even though Hector is hung over
and barely appropriately clothed, apparently he’s the only marginally
competent detective on the force. So it’s up to him to, you guessed
it: attempt to negotiate with the terrorist.

It turns out the terrorist has three curious demands: Hector is tasked
with 1) closing down the local porno shop, 2) repair the town’s old
clock tower and 3) contribute to a local community beautification
society. The remainder of Episode 1 is concerned with meeting these
three demands.

As you help solve these puzzles, Hector gets to meet a variety of
daffy and hilarious characters. There’s Filthy Rich, the prosperous
porno purveyor; a dopey Clappers Wreake booster who’s trying to make
the town a better place, the town drunk, and a wheelchair-bound unhinged
veteran clocktower keeper.

The puzzles are fair, funny, and reasonably clever. They definitely
fall into the traditional wheelhouse of third-person adventures. There
are no “special screen puzzle” puzzles. Everything can be
solved through dialog and manipulation of objects. It’s important
to remember to get creative and attempt to combine items, use items
on the environment, and to explore each screen carefully. As in most
games of this type, if there’s something weird and obvious in the
environment, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll need to use it before
the end of the game.

Once Hector meets the mysterious terrorist’s demands, the game quickly
builds to a cliffhanger ending, which leaves you primed and ready
to leap into Episode 2: Senseless Acts of Justice.

Senseless Acts of Justice begins with Hector once more
stuck in a small environment. This time around, it’s a destroyed building.
What does he have to work with? A disgusting toilet. Plus, huzzah,
he’s got help: his dippy partner Lambert.

Lambert is everything Hector is not: He’s trim, neat, polite, and
likes to play by the rules. It adds a welcome bit of complexity to
the second episode by giving you the ability, for some sections of
the game, to switch at will between the two characters. Lambert is
outside of the building Hector’s stuck in, and you have to help them
work together to free Hector so he can continue attempting to foil
the terrorist’s nefarious plans.

Once the dynamic duo succeeds in freeing Hector, it’s on to the working
the game’s central mystery: Who is the mysterious and deadly unseen
terrorist who’s threatening the safety of the town of Clappers Wreake?

In
Senseless Acts of Justice, Hector has a new set of puzzling
challenges to solve. These include: getting a reservation in the town’s
fanciest restaurant, tracking down a phantom meat delivery boy, negotiating
with a pair of game prostitutes, and infiltrating a Catholic-church-themed
sex club (yes, there’s a pole-dancing nun).

The pleasure in this kind of game comes from that “connect the
dots” feeling. With each new problem you solve, the world opens
up a little bit – you get through that locked door, or get that
person to talk to you or give you that object. The world of Hector
is absurd, but from an adventure game point of view, it’s also logical
and fair.

After another cliffhanger ending, you’re on to Episode Three:
Beyond Reasonable Doom.

This episode opens up once again on a locked-room puzzle, and once
again you have to solve it by having Hector and Lambert work together.
But Lambert gets to do more this time around, because there’s an extended
sequence that takes place at a very curious farm during which you
can continue to switch back and forth between the two characters at
will.

Once you make it back to town, Hector has to solve a series of puzzles
at a town fair. This gives the game creators a chance to have a tasteless
field day (the town police booth features “Meet a Murderer”
and one of the rides is very frankly called “The Regurgitator”).
Only Hector and Lambert know the dire trouble the town is in, and
they’re on their own as they solve the puzzles to try to foil the
bad guy.

And yes, there’s a really, really disgusting toilet. That you
have to use to solve a puzzle. Don’t ask.

Length-wise, the episodes get longer with each installment. The first
episode is two to three hours long, the second about three to four,
and the last one about six.

One of the things I admire the most about Hector is the feeling that
the game’s creators are jamming working class British humor into every
nook and cranny they can think of. The interface is funny (you have
to admit you’re a big wimp in order to exit the game). There’s
a built-in hint system, and it’s funny (yes, you have to take
a lot of abuse in order to avail yourself of the hints).

The game even has self-referential jokes, commenting things like
the game’s length. The dialog is always funny, frequently hilarious.
It’s worth taking it slow and reading all of the possible questions
and responses you can get from the various characters.

If Hector isn’t the funniest adventure game I’ve ever
played, it’s certainly one of the funniest. I cannot emphasize enough
that you should not play this game if you are easily offended! But
if you aren’t, you owe it to yourself to try all three episodes of
Hector: Badge of Carnage.

¹VERY
“M.”
²You’d
think that this would mean that I’m a huge comic book fan, but I’m
actually not.
³Speaking of which, how
about releasing the third episode already? It’s been over three years
since Episode 2!!

System Requirements:

It’s a casual game. It’ll run on your PC just fine.

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.