It's been a while since I last indulged in an adventure game, and today's Yesterday (so many bad jokes I could make, so little patience for my own bullshit presently) comes courtesy of Pendulo Studios, whose The Next Big Thing was a flawed but enjoyable pastiche of those 1950s/1960s "battle of the sexes" comedies. More than that though, the game had an imaginative premise - the movie monsters of the Universal Horror and "Saucer Men" B-movie eras are real, and get themselves embroiled with Hollywood scandals as easily as anyone else - and some fairly decent puzzles, writing and voice-acting. Along with King Art Games and Wadjet Eye, they're one of the bigger Indie developers focused on creating deliberately old-school adventure game fare, of the type with lateral thinking inventory puzzles and dialogue trees.

I wasn't quite prepared for how... odd... Yesterday is. Again, Pendulo finds a fairly novel concept that I won't spoil here, because it's a large mid-game reveal that contexualizes everything you've done and the rest of the game's story. In short and as synopsis-like as possible, there's a short prologue with a supercilious community volunteer named Henry White and his burly companion Samuel Cooper, after which the player switches to the amnesiac John Yesterday: a historian and researcher of Satanic cults who an older Henry White has hired to look into a spate of serial murders of the disenfranchized homeless of New York City. Of late, they've begun to get tortured and ritualistically murdered, their bodies bearing the mark of a centuries-old sect that was eradicated by the Spanish Inquisition. That mystery operates in tandem with the immediate mystery of John's memory loss, and how he came to be in that state.

The oddness comes in with the game's tone. It's very sullen around 80% of the time, treating seriously its subject matter of horrific torture, Satanic cults, madness, loss (both of memory and loved ones), abandonment and murder. Other times, it likes to joke around, which I feel is something left over from Pendulo's earlier The Next Big Thing and their caper-esque Runaway trilogy. It clearly wants to be a slightly more vicious Broken Sword, complete with European globe-hopping (around a third of the game is set in Paris, among other places), a capable female deuteragonist who alternates between loving the hero and hating his guts, a conspiracy that goes back hundreds of years, and some really nasty people on the hero's trail. It doesn't quite balance that game's levity and suspense, however, instead making the short bursts of humor feel completely random and disruptive. An example of this is how John momentarily flashbacks to his katana training in a Nepalese temple (?) with a sarcastic blind master who subverts the age-old wizened mystic trope with his slightly fourth-wall breaking jabs - it's an already ludicrous scenario considering how much it clashes with the rest of the game, and these flashbacks often announce themselves right in the midst of a tense action scene. It's one thing for your brooding, troubled hero to suddenly grab a samurai sword and lunge at an assassin, but it's something else when it's immediately interrupted with a tricky puzzle up a serene Asian mountain with a blind old guy who keeps making fun of you.

I'll also say this: many of Yesterday's puzzles are not what I would call intuitive. Most of the adventure games I've played this year have been of a 90s vintage - The Dig, Day of the Tentacle, Legend of Kyrandia - and I've come to realize that the node of my brain that handles moon logic adventure game puzzles has atrophied a little with all these comparatively straightforward and quality-of-life enriched modern adventure games of late. Yesterday threw me right back into that world of confusion, even though it retains most of those quality-of-life improvements: there's a button for marking all the hotspots on the screen, though it's oddly uncooperative in how it works, and the game has a hint system in place if you're truly desperate. One puzzle required that you open a fan grate in your hotel bathroom that was clearly attached by Phillips screws, and the most likely utensil in your arsenal - a dull letter opener - didn't fit the bill. The idea was to go outside onto your room's balcony, find a hard stone sculpture of a horse head (presumably a knight, since there's some chess puzzles), and use it to sharpen the letter opener to the point where it could be used to open the grate. All this to get half of a password to open a safe. In some ways, it's about as classic adventure game puzzle as they come, and I should commend Pendulo for that accuracy alone, yet I also feel that this new era of adventure games realized it wasn't just embarrassing FMV live actor cutscenes and Mensa puzzle over-reliance that killed adventure games the first time around; it was a gradual decay, compounded by endless "cat hair moustache" puzzles from otherwise well-regarded adventure games. Heck, I bounced off Grim Fandango for a second time last year because I could no longer brook its annoying puzzles and interminable wandering, for as much as I loved everything else about it from its style down to its repartee.

In spite of this, and its weird tonal issues, I didn't mind Yesterday so much. While the puzzles were a little obtuse, I didn't need any hints for any of them in the end in part because the game knew to compartmentalize its individual "scenes" - a really important level design philosophy I'm glad so many new adventure games adhere to, where the number of screens and hotspots are kept to a minimum and the inventory is reset with each new location, even if Yesterday was particularly fond giving you lots of red herrings to lug around. I also found its premise fascinating, though its script far less so, and I'm inclined to see what its Yesterday Origins prequel is about. It's not the best adventure game I've played recently - in fact, it's not even the best Pendulo Studios game I've played, and I've only played the two - but it gets a soft recommendation from me for those into the high-concept stuff. (I do feel like I should probably catch up on the Broken Sword games too, though. How did they get to five without me noticing?)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I'm very fond of Pendulo. I think Dream of the Turtle is one of the best unsung adventure games out there, and I loved what they did with The Next Big Thing and Yesterday. Yesterday's tone was a bit bonkers, but I kinda liked that - it felt freeform in a way, like the writers just spilled their minds on a table and said, screw it, let's go for it. That said, I thought it was a bit short and I would've liked to have seen more from its cast of characters beyond the portagonists.

Pendulo was kinda in the dark there for a while after Next Big Thing. Kinda hoping they find their way back to adventure games - I think Yesterday Origins is a different genre, if I'm not mistaken (hidden object, maybe? I'll update this when I play it and if I remember). In any case, it's been a long time since they took a swing at something really original. What they did - normalizing clues within games in their later adventure games - was a big step forward for the genre, and I loved their particular brand of insanity. Here's hoping they can find the funding and the guts to put out an original product again.

Okay, played a couple hours of Yesterday Origins. It's still essentially an adventure game, just stripped down to its bare components. Kinda liking it so far, but it feels narrow and constricted.