Guard Duty

Guard Duty has an interesting and somewhat unique premise. The game consists of two parts with two different protagonists, set about one thousand years apart. In the end these two very separate settings, historical fantasy and futuristic science fiction, come together to form one single story.

The game begins in some past history, with a comical fantasy setting where the player controls Tondbert, a loyal guard to the Castle of Wrinklewood. He happens to have a bad day, or rather night, on the job, and as a result an evil spirit or something like that gets inside the town gates. Kidnapping the princess is usual fantasy game stuff, but the consequences will be very harsh this time, the history and the future and the world as we, or they in the game, know it.

Not spoiling how the story develops from there, at one point the game will jump into a futuristic science fiction world, where the player will be helping Agent Starborn, who lives in the world with robots, hi-tech, and space stations, and who is fighting against the evil that is ruling the world.

Technically speaking, the game is an Adventure Game Studio game with (scaled) 320x240 pixel art retro graphics, and the game has a very old-school feeling to it. There won't be any deaths and dead ends, so doing and trying everything is risk-free, but just in case the game autosaves every now and then, which is nice. The game is also fully voice acted, but the main developer guy being a cheapskate (his words from the credits!), he has voiced most of the characters himself, including both protagonists. He does a fairly good job, though, so nothing to complain about.

So everything seems to be quite good and inspiring about the game. And a nice game it is indeed. The unusual approach doesn't come without its problems, however. First of all, having fantasy and science fiction settings are very dissimilar no matter how they are done, but the way they have been done makes things worse. The Tondbert/fantasy part is filled with comedy, including anachronisms such as the world having photo laboratories and such. The Starborn/sci-fi part is dark with very little humour at all.

That in itself wouldn't be a major issue, even if somewhat confusing, but what is really weird is that these two parts have different control schemes as well. The fantasy part has an inventory and all that traditional stuff, but the sci-fi part has a context-sensitive control, where, for instance, clicking a hotspot will automatically use an inventory item if that has been picked up. To confuse some less tech-savvy players, there is even an extremely odd design choice of the game menu button being on the left side in the fantasy world and on the right side in the science fiction world! Other than making it as visible as possible that it's a different world, it's very hard to understand the reasoning behind that. Things get a bit confusing even for a seasoned gamer in the very end, where it is possible to switch protagonists (and thereby the control scheme) on the fly.

It is impossible to tell whether the developers wanted the game to feel like two separate games in one, or if that is just a by-product of the concept. The good thing is, though, that unlike so many games which start strong only to fade towards mediocrity as the game goes on, Guard Duty is the opposite of that. The game starts in an uninspiring fashion, with the goal being to find the guard's missing clothes, with some extremely lame humour around all that. But from there the game keeps getting gradually better and better, with the future part being in itself a great atmospheric experience.

These strange design choices are very challenging to put under any meaningful critique, because there's no way to tell which the intention has been there. (Well, asking the developer could work, but it's more fun to try to speculate.) The same goes for some locations in the game. For instance, in the fantasy village there is one location that is not needed for anything really, even though there is even a voiced character in that location. A feature of the intended design? A leftover from some unfinished puzzle that never got completed? An intentional red herring? Who knows? (Yes, the developer knows – that was a rhetorical question.)

There are some small annoyances in the game too, which again raise many questions. For instance, when playing as Tondbert, there is one location in the castle that can be accessed only through the castle library. Fair enough, but in order to enter that place, the player must first enter the castle library, then enter the middle of the library screen, and only from there enter the desired location, even though the right door is visible from the library door. A similar thing happens when playing as Starborn. Using the radio communication device, the player can contact persons A, B, and C, but contacting B and C can only be done by contacting A first, even though that person has the least information for the player. So a round of redesigning here and there could have benefitted the game, although mostly it is quite alright.

Forgetting all that unusual design, the game is actually fun to play. For an experienced adventurer, the game is quite easy – there's no need for walkthroughs. For someone with less experience the game has challenges, including mazes (yes, that's a plural form). To give credit where credit is due, mazes aren't those annoying kinds of ones but have some interesting takes on the maze puzzle type. Especially the maze with a giant spider is one of the most entertaining mazes in the genre. Mazes like that work great, as they are more like structured puzzles than ways to block the player from advancing, as is the case with most traditional adventure game mazes. Having said that, three mazes of any kind in a relatively short adventure game like this is too much.

The game flow is nice enough to keep the momentum going all the time somewhere, although there is the disturbing unevenness present. Sometimes the game is crazy comedy, sometimes semi-serious cyberpunk science fiction. Sometimes puzzles require the usual fetch questing and inventory puzzling, but at times the game plays almost like a kinetic visual novel. There are some places which really call for a series of puzzles, like fixing and using a broken catapult, but never really have any challenge at all. But then one of the biggest challenges is tied around an anachronistic joke about photographs. The two different worlds are both very nice, but don't form one whole game seamlessly, and would probably be better used as a basis for two separate games.

Regardless of everything, the game is entertaining for its relatively short length and is definitely among the better neo-retro adventures. While not every idea in the game works completely as intended, the developers should be thanked for trying to come up with a unique spin on the adventure genre. The game is very indie in the true spirit of indie and has that experimental feel to it that the big companies in the game industry have long ago lost

If guard duty isn't the easiest thing in the world, neither is developer duty. Sick Chicken have made a solid effort here, and any adventurer who wants to experience something familiar combined with something new should have a good time playing the game. Approaching the game from the critical side, it is lacking in some aspects and is not quite as polished as it should be. It's good, but not spectacular. But if it's fun to play through the entire adventure, there shouldn't be anything to complain about. Right?

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