: Welcome to Hector: Badge of Carnage. There’s a short intro cutscene I wasn’t able to capture on stream, because this game came out in 2011 and does not like my 21:9 display and OBS won’t detect it unless it’s fullscreen (where it stretches to 21:9 and looks like complete ass). This first shot gives you a pretty good idea of what this game is like.
: This game takes place in the fictional British town of Clappers Wreake, which I assume is a Britslang pun of some sort that I’m too American to understand. This opening scene has no subtitles, but what’s happening is that the Clappers Wreake Police Department are responding to a hostage crisis.
: The entire cutscene is meant to show that the police are completely incompetent. A lot of this is basically the developer inserting a bunch of unwanted commentary on British politics into the game.
: Basically, all you need to know is that there’s a hostage crisis, and the terrorist behind it kills anyone who tries to negotiate with him.
: Most of these characters aren’t important. On the left we have Hector’s sidekick, Lambert, who is shown to be as cartoonishly incompetent as the rest of the police. On the right are.. two guys whose names I forget but they’re the heads of the police department.
: Meet our protagonist, Detective Inspector Hector. The game never really explains why Hector is in a cell in the police department, but he implies that this is where he lives.
: “…with a nun. Or was it a goat?”
: Hector’s entire character consists of him being drunk a lot and having sex with things. Get used to this.
: And with that, we get our first mission of the game - get Hector out of his cell and get him some pants. And also answer the phone that’s ringing just outside.
: This game uses a lot of really dumb moon logic. The devs were competent enough to avoid anything like the Big Bullshit Puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (which I also LPed) and generally give you enough clues to figure out what to do. There’s also a hint system, which I’m pretty sure was a paid thing in the iOS version. Hector’s voice, by the way, is basically the guy from Arrival in Hell.
: You’ll notice that the game will tell you what command you’re using in the bottom-left hand corner. This game controls like a mobile game: you single-click to look at something, double-click to interact with it.
: Again, this is pretty much the entire game. I hated it almost from the get-go. I get that every adventure game protagonist can’t be a Guybrush Threepwood, but Hector is pretty much an unlikable asshole on the level of that guy from Deponia.
: Next thing we want to grab is this whiskey bottle. We don’t have any immediate use for it, but it’ll get used pretty soon.
: Finally, there’s this poster over here, which.. I think the devs are assuming that anyone playing this has seen The Shawshank Redemption. I feel like, given the fact that the movie came out in 1994 and people born in 1999 are 20 years old at this point, it’s entirely possible that there are people old enough to be in the “target demographic” who haven’t seen it. Hell, I know people my age who haven’t seen Forrest Gump and that came out the same year.
: You might ask what the fuck we’re going to do with a spoon. See that grate over there?
: Thanks for the buffalo shot, game. Anyway, at this point we know the condom isn’t going to work, and using the bottle gets you the standard ‘that won’t work’ message, so let’s just use the spoon.
: Episode 1 of Hector does something that the other two episodes (at least, I know Episode 2 doesn’t) do not: it has items that have to be examined to break them down into a different item. In this case, the shoe breaks down..
: Into a shoelace.
: The humor in this game really falls flat, and I think this is just another example of that. There’s only one thing left in the room that Hector will have any kind of reaction to, and that’s the toilet.
: I’ll spare you the mandatory scene where Hector takes a piss, which he does before he’ll look at the toilet any further. Hector will refuse to pick up the paperclip, and really it doesn’t take long to just combine everything until you get..
: Now, a well-designed game might just let you use the paperclip on the door to escape, but not Hector.
: First, we have to click it to turn it into a lockpick. Why the developers thought this was at all necessary is beyond me.
: This update’s going to be short so I can get something out. Next time, we’ll go out on the streets and recover Hector’s pants.