I’m writing this Pants Quest review the day before a Tuesday (Monday, fact fans) as I just can’t bear it. Everyone moans about Mondays being the worst, but so many people have lieu days now, that Tuesday is the new Monday. Dave gets it. He’s experiencing a pretty bad Tuesday.
His alarm goes off at 5 am when it’s dark – the worst time to wake up, and it’s another day at the rat race. His room’s a mess; he has a few chores to attend to before the day begins, but wait: where are his pants? Having a pixelated hero running around stark bollock naked would be amusing, but the pants he refers to are his trousers.
Ok, premise set: locate his pants, but Dave is meticulous and must complete his to-do list before finding said pants. Sure, you can explore his rather lovely pixel art home and interact with things, but he won’t necessarily pick anything up until you’ve prioritised it. It was these steps that had me yelling FFS more than once.
Pants Quest is a very short point and click adventure from Ghost Cat Games. The time it takes to play a game is subjective based on skills and whether you’re the type to read and interact with everything. I’m one of the latter and can confirm that Pants Quest took me under an hour to complete.
That may or may not be the decider whether you want to ‘bother with it’. I sometimes read comments from fellow gamers that are a bit peeved about the duration of a game, well, it’s spelt out for you, and I’d still say it’s a good game, regardless of how brief it may be.
I believe there are four scenes in the game and a reasonable amount of backtracking without it being arduous. It’s not the actions or challenge that is frustrating about Pants Quest, it’s how the problems occur. For example, you replace a light bulb, and the wind blows down your fence. After re-erecting the fence (heh – ‘erect‘), the dog spontaneously combusts. None of these things happen in the game, but it felt like it.
Locating the pants isn’t a Macguffin – you do need to find them, then jump through several hoops to reach the end goal of going to work. Ah, that’s why people envy me when I say I work from home… Despite all this faffing about, I enjoyed it. The traditional combining of objects is super easy and didn’t offer any challenge, so I had fun exploring Dave’s apartment instead, reading every book’s spine and interacting with everything.
There were two puzzles, from memory. One was working out a sequence for a machine (easy only because I drew the shapes the moment I found the clue), and a switch puzzle that I fluked through after 5-10 minutes. Solving this without a walkthrough (the game wasn’t released at the time) was one of my greatest achievements. Well, after learning how to use the microwave.
Pants Quest is an amusing game and very self-aware with the problems it throws at the user, and for that reason, it’s well worth experiencing. Though some of it was quite frustrating in terms of the concept (art imitating life perhaps), the only thing I didn’t like about it was the sound effects when Dave speaks. I’ve always found those garbled sounds annoying. It’s far from game-breaking, and there’s always the mute button. Actually, I didn’t like the switch puzzle either, but that’s because I’m thick.
Overall, it’s a classic style point and click in the mould of Zak McKraken or the more recent Dude, Where Is My Beer? If anything can go wrong, everything WILL go wrong in this mini-adventure, but it’s a fun one at that. Just be mindful about the runtime beforehand and save yourself the time moaning about it.
I liked it!
