AntVentor is a point-and-click adventure game published by LoopyMood, available for Windows, Mac OS, and Steam OS. This independent game company is breaking into the development scene with AntVentor.
It’s been a while since I have touched a point-and-click game. I played games like Putt-Putt as a kid before swapping over to the PlayStation 2. I always enjoyed playing them, but I got dragged away by games that offered flashier or more complex mechanics. Granted, I started with The Incredibles movie tie-in game, so I was definitely more interested in the recognizable characters than something like immersive experience.
I never returned to point-and-click games seriously because they were often easy to complete by design and the market never gave me many options. Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam are games made for kids, so they are not very long or committed experiences. In addition, the puzzles are geared towards kids and thus not incredibly difficult to understand. This was the context I had for understanding point-and-click games, and while I’m sure this cannot be applied to all of these types of games, I had no reason to think I had an incorrect mentality. AAA game companies simply don’t make point-and-click games. They don’t appear on the main stage of E3, and there aren’t vocal communities supporting these games. I’ve never been exposed to a more complex point-and-click experience.
AntVentor changed my perception that point-and-click games are for kids because of how accessible it is. The experience from this game very much applies to all audiences because the story is innocent but the puzzles are challenging. Kids can still play this game, but it does not feel purposely built for them alone. A person of any age can play this game and enjoy the experience.
AntVentor follows the cleverly named FlorAntin, a lazy ant whose machine, which automatically grinds up sticks, breaks. Ant identifies what he needs to fix his machine, and he sets off to acquire his supplies. You guide Ant as an omnipotent third party and help him along his adventure by side scrolling through various areas.
The most immediately noticeable feature of AntVentor is the art style. The game mixes photos and animation to create its environment. The whole landscape is taken from photographs, which helps solidify the idea that you are looking from an ant’s perspective. Instead of attempting to animate a large pill bottle and potentially make it look exaggerated and silly, the developers just use a zoomed picture to give an authentic image. All of the animated characters interact well with the photos, not making it obvious that they were generated in two different ways. I’ve never seen this artistic choice before in a game, so I was impressed by the novelty of it as well as its effectiveness.
The choice of using an ant as the protagonist offered something fresh and stimulating. In order to complete the puzzles, you have to think from an ant’s perspective. You don’t have to have an intimate understanding of how ants function to play, but you cannot rely on assumptions you may have from previous game experiences. If I saw a river and I needed to get some water, I would look for a bucket. I start looking for the bucket because past games required that solution to similar problems. An ant cannot use a bucket though, so collecting water comes with the added challenge of finding an appropriate vessel. This is event reflected in the inventory system. All point-and-click games I have seen have an inventory that lets you combine two items to make a new item. AntVentor is no exception, but here it forces you to think outside of the box to create new items to solve unfamiliar situations. For example, in the opening tutorial, you need to combine some small sticks and the thread from a spool to make an improvised rope ladder to escape from your den. Before you harvest the materials, the sticks were supposed to be ground up by the machine, and the spool was used as a table. In the human world, you would never appropriate a table to create a rope ladder, but it makes sense in the ant world. You need to assess how the world of FlorAntin works before you can act accordingly.
The ant premise works well again for character depiction. None of the animals ever speak to one another because, well, they’re animals. All the animals communicate through grunts, shrieks, and thought bubbles containing pictures. Due to this, all of the characters still feel real and convey emotion without having to speak a word. None of the characters, then, have an accent or gendered voice, which fuels accessibility. It is an open environment for anyone to enter.
This game offers a legitimate challenge, unlike the point-and-click games with which I was familiar. The difficulty of the puzzles came, not from the puzzles themselves, but from the nature of the environment. In the games I knew, the interactable parts of a screen looked different from static parts, easily revealing to me what I could click and what I should avoid. AntVentor’s artstyle generates all of the terrain through photos, so interactable and static objects look identical. Even with an idea of what item you need for a puzzle, you still have to figure out the specific object that needs to be clicked. This proves to be a challenge because of the shift in perspective described earlier. You need to think like an ant, and the game does not give any free hints unless you ask. A rock can no longer be disregarded, and each leaf needs to be scrutinized.
Even with the challenge of each puzzle, the game was a tad short. I completed the entire thing in under two hours. While this was disappointing, LoopyMood promotes this as chapter one, with part two under development. I’m glad this is not the end for the game, because it certainly has a great deal of room to explore its unique premise.
Looking through available point-and-click games in the market right now, I find many that look low effort. Some seem lazily made, and their retail price of one dollar does not convince me I am wrong. Others are flash games, and I personally have never left a flash game satisfied and wanting more. AntVentor is only five dollars on Steam, and it is an utterly pleasant experience. As a stand-alone game, it can do well as a nice distraction or perhaps something to cure a tilting experience from another game. I think it could act well as a whole game if a collection was one day compiled of all the AntVentor chapters to come.
Musings of a Curious Gamer 