Hector: Badge of Carnage

I've had this knocking around since I bought that Humble Bundle with all the Telltale games. Unlike most (all?) of the others, this one wasn't connected to any franchise I heard of. In retrospect, I should have expected this to be a nice film noir story, but it quickly became too absurd and comedic to qualify.

Screenshot of Hector in a park with some delinquents having a rave.

Hector is a police detective, and doesn't hide the fact that he's an alcoholic slob who is so cheap that he sleeps at work in loo of going home at night. The first episode opens with Hector waking up in a jail cell, and your first challenge is getting out. He can't simply ask any of his co-workers to open the door, since they're all out at a hostage situation. Once you break out and speak with the hostage taker, you need to do 3 things in beautiful Clappers Wreake, a town in the English Midlands that deindustrialized so much that it dilapidated worse than Detroit.

The second episode deals with the the aftermath of the explosion that concluded the first episode. Like the first episode, this one has you going all over town to track down the guy that set off the explosion. The third episode has you waking up in a septic tank on a farm. Afterwards, you go to a street fair and stop the villain from turning everyone into blood thirsty savages.

The visuals are nice handdrawn comics. The style reminds me of mid-2000s Penny Arcade. However, because this uses the old Telltale engine, I can hear the tell-tale artifacts of very compressed MP3s in character's dialog. Gameplay is the usual pointy-clicky adventure games that are par for the course for Telltale games. Once I ran out of ideas to get out of that jail cell, I resorted to looking up guides and let's plays on Youtube. After needing to look under the mattress for something, I realized that this game uses the Sierra pixel-hunting school of game design, rather than the more refined ideas that came after. At least there were no timing based puzzles here.

This is not a game that I intend to revisit for any reason. I didn't enjoy it that much. I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Tales from the Borderlands
Borderlands 3 has been out for almost a year, but I haven't bought it yet. Yes, I'm aware that it's on Steam these days, but I haven't been that enthused about it. I'll probably get it in the next Steam sale, along with the Halo collection (because I threatened a long time ago to buy it if it came to Steam). I intended to play through all the Telltale games in order of release before I got to Tales from the Borderlands (and all that before Borderlands 3), but that hasn't happened. Even without that, I recognized lots of tropes of the latter Telltale games (Walking Dead and afterwards) that I've heard told over the years. I'm pretty sure that there's no kind of continuity to spoil by not playing through them in order of release.
The Wolf Among Us
Like the Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us is a series based on comic books. (I'm not familiar with either comics.) The setup is simple: all the fairytale characters were forced to leave whatever kingdoms they lived in, and are holed up in New York City scraping by. You play as Sheriff Bigby Wolf. (Bigby Wolf -> Big B. Wolf -> Big Bad Wolf) Because I've portrayed this guy in school plays, I'm immediately on his side.
Puzzle Agent
Puzzle Agent is another one of those Telltale games that I've had in my Steam library for years. Well, it and its sequel, Puzzle Agent 2. They're so similar that the second one is functionally an expansion of the first, so I'm doing them both here.
Sam & Max Save the World
From way back when point and click adventure games ruled PC games, there was a dog and a rabbit. These buddies went around as private investigators solving stuff. I'm not sure which stuff in particular, because I missed the boat. The series wasn't a blockbuster take-over-the-world smash hit, but it had a dedicated following.
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse
The game opens and closes every episode with a narrator. He doesn't do much, and only explains obvious things that I could figure out myself. He has a slight British accent, but he isn't Stanley's. The office that Sam and Max uses is unavailable for the entire game. They were kicked out between the last season and the first episode of this one. The C.O.P.S. have moved into the Desoto, and Sam uses it as a mobile office.
The Walking Dead
Hey look, a game for Halloween! (Yes, I planned this one, unlike last time.) I've finished playing through The Walking Dead, the game that Telltale Games got popular on. This is one of those games from the zombie craze that reached its height around 10 years ago. I think this rode the coat tails of a Netflix series based on the same comic series, but the game has different characters and story. It merely takes place in the same world.