It's as I suspected, a point-and-click adventure game that strives to recreate the feel of the latter-day LucasArts Adventure Games and unfortunately comes up a little short.
I was able to find a copy of the first issue of "The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy" and read it in between play sessions of "The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy". I could not find the second or third issues, which is too bad because I would like to see how these characters were developed further before the game, and possibly what else may have informed the game's writing. "The Incredible Adventures..." is a 2010 Portuguese comic book written by Filipe Melo and drawn by Juan Cavia telling the story of hapless pizza delivery boy Eurico as he gets drawn into the world of the supernatural in Lisbon, Portugal as he tries to recover his scooter after it's stolen by some gargoyles. "Dog" Mendonça is a private detective who is also a werewolf and has established a "code" that he expects all the supernatural residents of Lisbon to follow in order to not interfere with the regular humans.
As an aside; Cavia's art style seems heavily inspired by Carlos Meglia, who drew the 1992-99 comic series Cybersix, even down to close-cropped hair or arm hair drawn as small dark rectangles on the skin. I only know this because I tried to start a podcast discussing cartoons from the '80s and '90s and Cybersix was one of the first series we watched and talked about.
Back to discussing "The Interactive Adventures..." the game starts in medias res with Dog, Eurico, Dog's partner Pazuul, and the decapitated head of the gargoyle thief in Dog's car chasing a bunch of other gargoyles who have now stolen a truck. You take the role of Eurico as Dog and co. are pulled into a wholly new investigation starting with a young woman seeking to hire Dog to help her break a gypsy curse, maybe. The controls are your standard LucasArts fare, any interactable object brings up three options, Eye, Hand, and Mouth as context-sensitive commands of Look, Interact/Pick up, and Talk/Eat. Your inventory is in Eurico's jacket, you can click and drag items onto one another in order to combine them or drag them out of his jacket to interact with the environment.
The game's story, as I mentioned, begins with a young woman coming in to Dog's office asking for his assistance. This is where you the player are introduced to the game's dialogue system and the first discussion-based puzzle. Unfortunately, I think the writing falls short in this puzzle because I don't like the options; you as Eurico are tasked with interrogating the young woman, who may or may not be the victim of a curse, to try and get her to provide more information. She makes three vague statements and you have to choose one of three options in order to get her to elaborate. The options you are given are Empathize, Confront, and Tease with no indication of what Eurico will say and one of those actions is the right follow-up to each vague statement. I got irritated because when I tried to Empathize with the woman's first two statements she accused me of being patronizing and Dog made fun of me. Thankfully we're in an Adventure game so no matter how annoyed she got she stuck around until I made all the correct choices.
After that in the game's first environment Dog is trapped in a cage and then kidnapped leaving Eurico on his own to continue the investigation. That's about as far as I've gotten in the game, I've only had about an hour to play over the last week.
So far I don't know that I would recommend this game. The art is neat, as I mentioned earlier it's very reminiscent of Cybersix so if you like that I think you'll appreciate this. The puzzles so far don't feel that intuitive, I guess? One was solved just by clicking around a room, another was the interrogation puzzle I talked about. Maybe if I get farther in the game the story will open up more. It's $15 at regular price now and has been discounted down to $3.75 each time it's been on sale, so if you're looking for a new Point-and-Click game that's not a Telltale one this might be a good value for you.
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