Adventure games have always had a low-key sociopathy issue. The genre is built on petty theft, where you’re encouraged if not required to grab everything around you that isn’t nailed down, but they got steadily darker as time went on. If you do a deep dive on the genre, it isn’t long before you rack up some assault, vandalism, and occasional manslaughter, usually for the dumbest reasons.
For years, I’ve argued that the nadir (or possibly apex; it’s all about perspective) of adventure crimes was in 2003’s Runaway 2: Dream of the Turtle, where a major puzzle solution requires you to slather a guy in bear pheromones. The last time you see him, he’s being chased offscreen by an amorous grizzly. I’m not making this up. It’s a Shakespeare reference and a sex crime!
I haven’t seen a realistic contender for Runaway 2’s title until now, with Slender Threads, a short, creepy point-and-click adventure game where you play as the Mr. Bean of murder. Threads’ protagonist Harvey Green is a hapless everyman with good intentions, but he’s the unwitting villain of his own story.
To be fair, that does end up being the point. Slender Threads is essentially a reverse whodunit; you’ve already figured out who the killer is, but not your motives. Even then, Harvey leaves such a broad wake of disaster that I can’t help but see Threads as a pitch-black parody of adventure game logic.
Threads is set in the rural United States somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Harvey is a frustrated writer and traveling bookseller who’s been sent on a business trip to the tiny town of Villa Ventana. As soon as he gets there, Harvey starts having a recurring nightmare where he sees his own severed head mounted as a hunting trophy.
One night, after one of those nightmares, Harvey goes on a walk through Villa Ventana. Through pure bad luck, he stumbles into the middle of a local conspiracy that involves several recent disappearances, a series of paranormal events that extends back to before the area was colonized, and before long, several gruesome deaths. Convinced that he’s next, Harvey sets out to learn more about the conspiracy, whatever it takes.
Threads is a deliberate throwback to the early ‘90s, particularly the various LucasArts games made in the SCUMM engine. As you explore Villa Ventana, you’re presented with a series of puzzles and obstacles, and have to use whatever you can find, learn, take, or steal to figure out solutions.
Like all old-school adventure games, that means the challenge of Threads is primarily a question of thinking outside the box. It has a knack for giving you small hints in an organic way, via conversation or context, as well as providing enough items and options at any given time that you can’t solve your current problem via simple process of elimination.
That’s what makes the stranger puzzles stand out, as they require you to suddenly rewire your brain. Maybe 75% of Threads is about clever solutions to unexpected problems, but that last 25% is about building a Rube Goldberg machine for no particular reason.
That’s still a leg up on quite a few adventure games, in my experience. On the grand scale of puzzle impenetrability, where an average survival horror game is a 1 (put the round medal in the round hole) and The Longest Journey is a 10 (that whole goddamn thing with the fedora and toy monkey), Threads is only about a 6. It’s usually a smooth experience, but has some speed bumps.
Part of that comes from Threads’ distinctive art style. It’s built to look like a paper-craft diorama, with 2D characters against a 3D backdrop, but occasionally breaks free of that for some more intensive animations. It feels closer to theater than many video games try to approach, which is to its overall benefit, and backs that up with a solid cast of voice actors.
In play, however, I found it difficult to pick out important objects from simple set dressing. One early puzzle had me stumped until I figured out that I was supposed to be interacting with a specific point on a particular statue, while another slowed me down until I went back through town to find the one item I’d missed in the corner of the local bookstore. Threads is at its best when it’s an adventure game, but has occasional deviations into hidden-object hell that drag down the whole.
I have a lot of affection for adventure games, as you might’ve guessed, so I’m working with some biases here. I do think the genre lost its overall way for quite a while, as it got bogged down by shovelware, Myst clones, or poor puzzle design.
Slender Threads is a decent throwback to the genre’s golden age. It dodges a few of the problems I’ve seen in recent similar revivals, but adds a few of its own, primarily in making it unnecessarily difficult to find key items or information.
Even so, there’s some real love for the genre on display here, including some of its traditional problems. I don’t know if Slender Threads was actually meant to be an entire game about ludonarrative dissonance, but either way, it’s worth being in on the joke. If you’re an adventure-game fan, you probably already bought this; if you aren’t, this could make for a fun couple of nights, but don’t expect it to always make sense.
[Slender Threads, published and developed by Blyts, is now available on Steam for $19.99. This column was written using a copy of the game purchased by Hard Drive.]
