Play time: 5 hours
Last played: 12.22.22
Revisit?: Probably not

BROK the Investigator is, “The very first PUNCH & CLICK!’, “an innovative adventure mixed with beat ’em up and RPG elements.” according to the Steam page, and I think that’s a pretty accurate description.

I’ll admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of point & clicks, and it’s entirely down to the gameplay, but I’ve been trying to try new genres and I figured a point & click with beat ’em up gameplay and RPG systems would give it the best possible chance, and boy was I wrong.

I’ll be the first to admit that I probably shouldn’t be reviewing games from this genre, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested. A well done story with logic puzzles seems really fun, but with my ADHD the gameplay has never been engaging enough. Unfortunately with Brok, I don’t think that was the case; no, with Brok I think it comes down to execution.

My two main issues with Brok are the amount of dialogue in the game (this is kind of a me thing, but I’ll expand on that in a second), and the lack of direction.

The game, being a point & click is obviously supposed to have puzzles and require some thought to get through, which I knew going in, but it seems to swing wildly from holding your hand, to even the hints being obscure and unhelpful. The breaking point for me, and when I stopped playing is a moment when you’re locked in a room and can switch between characters; neither of them seem to have any options.

I was already getting a little annoyed with the game and the lack of any obvious answers was the breaking point for me. And after looking it up, the solution is a bit dumb, but I can understand why I didn’t discover it. You simply can walk out of the level, which might seem like a 5head solution, but the thing is, the perspective makes it seem like you can’t go the direction you need to, and more importantly, before this section, the area you’re in you’ve always just teleported in to, so why would I ever assume I could leave?

The other element that made me put the game down, was the very drawn out dialogue. I appreciate the world building and the lore they were trying to deliver, but the game is fully voice acted (which is awesome!), and you never know what dialogue will help you with a side quest, or give you a hint on an object, so you kind of have to go through all the options and it just ends up getting boring and tiresome. A lot of the dialogue is just filler that just shouldn’t be there, with responses like “I’ve never heard of that” or “huh, that sounds interesting!”. It contributes nothing to the game or the story beyond giving you more buttons to click, so why include it at all?

Despite my complaints, though, I do think the game had a lot of promise. The story is pretty interesting, and the character building is pretty well done. The premise of the game, being a “punch & click”, is a really unique and interesting idea, and I think if it was done well it could be a promising sub-genre. The problem, is each of the things I mentioned also have cons: The story gets interesting around the 3 or 4 hour mark and up until then you just kind of have to push through with no real promise of return. The main character seems to be a grumpy, technology-resistant, stuck in the past old man, and while that might be what they’re going for, I don’t think it’s a relatable character at all, unless you were born sometime before 1970. So those, I guess, blunders in execution carry on throughout the game and for almost every high point there were 2 or 3 low ones that really took away from the overall experience.

Now, with 470 Very Positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, I think my opinions are in the minority, but regardless of my bias, I think BROK could have been a much better game if it had taken a bit of a different direction, and executed better on what it set out to do.

Thanks for hanging out,

- Zack