Dropsy (2015)

Being my sixth of twenty-six primary assassination targets for this year, I’m optimistically on track to take out the whole list! Dropsy came to me from 2016’s February Humble Monthly Bundle, and even included the “Warm Damp Hug Edition” content which adds two soundtracks and a 100-page PDF of design notes and sketches. If you’re interested in classic adventure game design, the booklet is probably worth a gander (after playing the game!).

In Dropsy, you play as the eponymous uncomfortably creepy-looking clown who’s trying to make the best of his place in life by helping the people around him, happily earning hugs as his reward. The gameplay is a classic point-and-click adventure, but as Dropsy is illiterate, all of the words in the game are garbled, and conversations happen only through descriptive image icons. This works very well, and settles you into the child-like mind of Dropsy. Additionally, the game features a day/night cycle, moving through dawn, midday, dusk, and night as you move from screen to screen or take naps. This means the characters actually move around their world a bit, depending on what time of day you visit each screen, and there are some puzzles that require a specific time of day.

Most, perhaps even all, of the puzzles in the game are very logical, but inventory glut and being able to see portions of puzzles before you have the items necessary to solve them means you’ll probably still end up trying to hammer every nail with a screwdriver, so to speak. One puzzle in particular is likely why my play time is rather long, involves a red herring, and also caused me to take a break from playing the game for two years. In the end, I still needed a hint for that one, but everything else was accomplished without hints. As classic point-and-click adventure gameplay goes, Dropsy’s quite good!

The game’s music and artwork are both just as unsettling as Dropsy’s appearance, but at the same time are both also as equally charming. The neighborhood, the forests, and even junkyards in the game are all drawn with the attention to detail that I love in pixelated artwork, and the characters all feel like they have their own personalities as well. Getting to make everyone happy and give them a hug (including many animals!), and often even change a character’s initial opinions about Dropsy, was a surprisingly good feeling to have in a video game.

If you suffer from coulrophobia, I’m not sure if I can still recommend the game, despite it being really very positive! There are a very small handful of “scary clown” moments, but these even frighten or worry Dropsy himself, and I don’t imagine they will cause any nightmares. I think it would be a perfect game to play if you’re determined to face that fear. Lastly, right now, I’m not sure if I liked the somewhat unexpected ending, but I could probably be persuaded to welcome it more if I played it through again. And I would definitely consider doing so to get some of the more difficult achievements… if I didn’t have a backlog that desperately needed hugging!

Finally, here’s an additional BLAEO review of Dropsy from disobeyeddycha! :)