Look, I have to be honest, I don’t usually like Point & Click Adventures. I’m in my thirties, but when I was a kid it kinda felt like they were already on their way out; I never really got into the likes of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango… I guess I sort of remember enjoying, rather specifically, Broken Sword 2, but the fact that its developers, Revolution, are still going and, apparently, released a second remaster of the original Broken Sword last year, was news to me.

I just haven’t really paid them much mind, well, ever. I know there’s developers out there who’ve been making them consistently and are still going strong – Wadjet Eye Games in particular jump to mind as the studio for them in recent years: they’ve been working on them for well over a decade now and have established something of a cult following, with this year’s release Old Skies being very well received… but still, to me, the genre feel dated. Whenever I have tried them I’ve not really managed to get into them, but the lack of attention I’ve given them does mean I’ve missed what might be something of an indie resurgence in the space, and while I’m probably not qualified to pick out the best of those, highlights include Clifftop Games’ Kathy Rain series, Lamplight City and Rosewater from Grundislav Game, and last year’s Loco Motive, the debut title from Robust Games.

To loop round to The Drifter: that last one, Loco Motive, was made with the assistance of PowerQuest, which is a Unity tool for making 2D Point & Click created by The Drifter’s developer, Powerhoof. Unsurprisingly, The Drifter was also made in PowerQuest: I mention it not only as a borderline interesting tidbit but also to highlight Powerhoof’s dedication to the genre. Their other full releases, Crawl and Regular Human Basketball are about as far from Point & Clicks as you’re likely to find, but there’s a wealth of almost a dozen smaller, free adventures on Powerhoof’s itch.io page, without which The Drifter mightn’t be the triumph I’m about to tell you it is.

Developer: Powerhoof
Publisher: Powerhoof
Release: 17 July 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 19,50€/$19.99 /16.75

So, without further ado, onto the game itself. I’m going to permit spoilers up to the end of the first of The Drifter’s nine chapters: or, to put it another way, spoilers as large as those in the game’s own Steam description. Primarily, that your character, Mick Carter, the eponymous drifter, is murdered within the game’s first hour; unceremoniously dumped in a body of water with a bag over your head, arms tied behind your back, and a weight dragging you down into the abyss. The icy water fills your lungs, and the inevitable happens: you die. Fortunately for you the player (and I suppose Mick himself), that’s not game over, as a few seconds later, he returns to life. He’s not been revived though; rather, he’s travelled back in time to the moment he was thrown into the water, and this time, with an inkling of what’s going on around him, knows to hold his breath until he manages to cut himself loose to escape repeating his fate.

This situation sets up the rest of the game: with the player guiding Mick through a ‘web of conspiracy’ to figure out what the hell is going on, from why someone tried to kill him in the first place, up to why it didn’t work and he instead phase-shifted back to life.

Without going into specifics, I will break that spoiler rule ever-so-slightly to suggest that, perhaps, if the player happens to get Mick killed again during the course of their playthrough it might yield similar results to the first time he died: namely, that he might return to life a few moments before that death occurred. I mention it not only to provide some insight into the game’s core premise, but also to have an excuse to praise Bloodhoof for the way it deals with the whole ‘dying in games’ thing in an actual clever, plot-centric way — as opposed to firing up a ‘you died’ screen and rolling you back to the previous checkpoint. There’s a thing you find in some games where the player knowledge and character knowledge don’t quite match up, and it leads to them behaving in a way which doesn’t really make sense. The place I associate it most with is – perhaps strangely – in those old Fighting Fantasy books, where Steve Jackson or Ian Livingstone decided they were randomly going to kill you off for taking a wrong turn: the only way you could avoid it was to just know, as the player, when that’s going to happen and to guide your character down a different pathway. In those sorts of games there was never a good reason for your character to suspect that certain death awaited them behind a particular door, but in The Drifter if you know a choice is going to lead to Mick’s untimely demise, then he knows too, because he’ll have lived it already and experienced it with you when you discovered that.

You might think knowing that you’re going to come back when you get yourself killed makes you worry about it less, but Mick still feels it, so in many ways it actually makes dying feel a hell of a lot worse than in a game where you just go back and start from a save point. In those sorts of stories, that death didn’t happen: it doesn’t matter how many times you die while playing, say, Resident Evil 4, Leon’s story is that he shot some baddies, saved the girl, and made it the whole way through relatively unscathed. If you keep getting Mick killed, his story is that he died over and over again, oftentimes in pretty painful, grizzly ways, before being repeatedly dragged back to life when really, he might rather just have it end. The pressure an upcoming death adds to the game is palpable: I can think of at least three different occasions where I was desperately trying to avoid repeating a previous mistake and genuinely doing worse because I was panicking about the incoming consequences. That probably wasn’t helped by my usual avoidance of anything too horror-oriented, and while there were a couple of moments that made me jump (and I do I have a pathetically low tolerance for that sort of thing) it’s worth mentioning that the game leans a lot more into suspense and atmosphere rather than what some might call – myself included – the ‘cheaper’ horror tricks like jump scares. Put simply, I’ve got the yellowest belly going, and I didn’t really have any problems getting through The Drifter.

Outside of its death mechanic, The Drifter plays out in much the same way as you might expect from any other Point & Click game: Mick can usually travel between a handful of locations, speaking to characters and collecting items which go into a drop-down inventory. He sort of has two inventories: one for his actual items which are used in various situations across the game, and another for his thoughts. The items are used as you’d expect, and implemented in blissfully straight-forward ways: I never found myself using an item with every other item, trying to brute-force the game’s logic, though you are occasionally rewarded with some funny dialogue if you, for example, attempt to use a brick on someone who’s been a little rude to you. The other inventory – what I’m calling Mick’s thoughts, but is referred to as ‘topics’ in the game – contains key plot points that Mick has discovered or remembered; or, if you prefer, questions that he needs answered. These are your primary resource in conversations with other characters, and something I really enjoyed in The Drifter: rather than go through a dialogue tree or pick from a handful of questions specific to that person, players instead select a topic to ask them about, provided it would make sense to do so. As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly well-versed in other Point & Clicks, so aficionados might well be shouting at their screen about how it’s nothing new and inspired by Secret of the Grim Tentacle 3, but I think it’s a relatively novel approach, and one that I certainly found a lot easier to engage with than what I’ve typically experienced in the genre. Once you’ve discussed a topic with them, any useful information they gave you is displayed when you hover on it: there’s no need to have that jarring repeated dialogue which, while often accepted in video games, feels bizarre to me and can get frustrating when you’re going over options trying to find a particular piece of information.

Design choices like the one above made for a user experience that I don’t feel I often get with Point & Click games. Perhaps you could argue that the level of challenge is toned down because of it, but I still had to work things out: it’s just that, in The Drifter it felt like the game was, for the most part, trying to help me do that, rather than obfuscate things in the name of difficulty. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve typically not got along with the genre, with the other being that, for me to personally find them engaging, the rest of the package is also going to have to really pull its weight. Primarily that means the story – which I’ll touch on a little more in a moment – but then also the art, music, and voice acting.

I think The Drifter’s art speaks for itself: for me personally it’s one of the most gorgeous examples of pixel art going – particularly in its more lively moments. There’s good examples of that in the game’s trailer, but to be honest I’d recommend not watching it, as while it definitely sells the vibe The Drifter is going for, it’s a little heavy on the spoilers for my liking. The music as well ties in fantastically throughout to contribute to the game’s atmosphere. Examples of both are easy enough to find, so the thing I think it’s most worth zeroing in on is the game's voice acting.

If your only exposure to Australian accents is from Bluey, you might experience some form of cultural whiplash once things start going wrong in The Drifter, which is – as you should be able to tell by now – pretty bloody early. Admittedly I do have to credit Bluey with familiaring me with all the Aussie slang in the game – I’m not sure I’d know what a chook or a dunny was without it, but otherwise you’ll not be surprised to hear that they’re tonally, pretty different.

Sorry, the voice acting; save one character – again, something I’ll touch when I get onto my brief, spoiler-free assessment of the game's story – they’re all voiced superbly. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing wrong with the quality of that character’s voice, and I’d assume the problem lies with direction rather than a choice from the actor, but that aside, everything serves to bring life to the world and keep players thoroughly engaged. When the credits rolled I was surprised to see how many of the characters were voiced by one actor, Adrian Vaughan, (including Mick himself and, admittedly, the one I’m about to complain about) but during the playthrough I would have never noticed that it was, effectively, the same bloke having a conversation with himself on a good number of occasions. That’s not to detract from the rest of the cast, who all absolutely hold their own and turn the characters from a few pixels on your screen to people you can actually care about.

So I’ll quickly air my grievance, which centres on the game’s second act. Calling it an act does The Drifter something of a disservice, as it’s far shorter than the first and third – it’s more-or-less one chapter, flanked by the rest of the game either side of it. The first point, and probably the most important, is that it’s the only area where I felt a bit of a lull in the story, and perhaps the only time I didn’t quite trust the direction the game was heading in. The Drifter had certainly built up enough goodwill ahead of getting there, and any fears quickly proved to be unfounded, but it definitely remains my least favourite part of the game by some margin. The pacing throughout the rest of the game was excellent: there are enough moments for you to catch your breath, but typically things are moving forwards at a wonderfully rapid speed, in a genre which can often feel stagnant while players are trying to figure out what to do next.

There were other aspects in that chapter which felt they hadn’t been given as much care as the rest of the game, not least that you encounter a key character who is, quite clearly, not all there. That would be fine, except, to me, the voice he’s been given feels very clichéd: like a sort of a questionable stereotype of someone who’s – for want of a better term – gone a bit mad. I’m wary of sounding sanctimonious, but I think there were a lot of ways he could’ve been played, dialogue and actions unchanged, which might have been less objectionable than going for the sort of hammy, over-the-top, “this person has clearly lost it” voice: it’s already profusely obvious from everything he says and does, so it felt a little unnecessary to make him into quite so much of a caricature. Any social issues aside, it just became a bit distracting and would take me out of the game with its absurdity, while every other character was drawing me into the story and keeping me hooked. As such, I was pretty happy when his presence became less integral to the story, as I didn’t want to have to be interacting with him every five minutes for the rest of the playthrough.

There may also be a few plot holes when it comes to the whole dying-and-coming-back deal: I have to admit that, even if I tend to quite like things with time travel elements in them, the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff always confuses me a bit, so someone smarter than me might be able to explain why – or why not – the logic doesn’t 100% track in certain places. For the couple of parts that I thought were a little skewed, I was happy to brush it off as me not quite getting it, rather than them being paradoxes, but if you’re a real stickler for time travel having strict rules then there might possibly be things that don’t add up exactly as they should.

Those issues were ultimately small blemishes on the story, (and like I say, I’m not even sure the time-travel stuff is one). I’d love to talk more about the many, many positives in the story, but doing so would require throwing out a bunch of spoilers: suffice to say that all the twists and turns culminated in an excellent conclusion which somehow tied up the dozens of questions the game presented over its eight-hour runtime.

Unfortunately for me, Powerhoof have a somewhat wide range of interests, which means I might be waiting a long time if I’m hoping for another Point & Click from them. Perhaps The Drifter will become a gateway drug into the genre for me – the cynic in me doubts it, as I’ve tried to play some of the most well-reputed of those that have been released in recent years, and, perhaps for the reasons I mentioned earlier in this review , none of them have ever clicked in anywhere close to the way The Drifter did. Then again, I didn’t have particularly high expectations for The Drifter, and now it’s one of my favourite gaming experiences of 2025. Perhaps it’s the gameplay, perhaps it’s the story, perhaps it’s just the overall vibe. Realistically it’s a combination of the three. All I know is that it’s a genre I’d typically shun, but that I absolutely loved it. The Drifter is awarded 9/10 by IndieLoupe.com.

The reviewed product was provided by the developer.

Video review: IndieLoupe.com

Review: The Drifter

The Drifter

Review: Occlude