Quest for Infamy is a throwback point-and-click RPG that rings the nostalgia bell every way that it can.
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Title: Quest for Infamy
Release Date: March 4, 2022 on Switch (July 10, 2014 on PC)
Price: $9.99
Suggested Audience Age: Rated M for Mature
Time to Play: 10.5 hours, according to How Long to Beat
Availability: Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, GoG
Recommended for fans of: Dusty PCs, Thicc Pixels, and Scoundrels
Geek to Geek Media was provided with a review copy of this title.
My background is almost entirely in console gaming, but every once in a while a throwback to the early days of PC gaming hits me with nostalgia like a ton of bricks. The trailer for Quest for Infamy’s Switch launch caught my eyes with its excellent aesthetics and sarcastic sense of humor. Now that I’ve spent some time with it, I can happily say that it totally works! Quest for Infamy is a great throwback game that has made an excellent transition to the Nintendo Switch.
Point and Click Click Click Click Click
I’m not sure if being a scoundrel in a medieval town is as much of a point-and-click trope as I think it is, but the setting of Quest of Infamy is exactly what I expect from an old-school adventure game. The prelude has you sneaking out the window of a castle after the lord catches you in bed with a maid, then you set off on the run and end up in a quaint town on the day of an execution.
You interact with the game by moving a cursor around and clicking on sections of the environment. There are three different movement speeds (sneaking, walking, and running), and you can also look at, talk to, touch, or fight anything you can see. Or, rather, you can try to do those things, but trying to pick a fight with something like a door will get you a quip from the omniscient narrator telling you what a dummy you are, rather than initiating an actual fight.
Performance and Plot
I do love that Quest for Infamy seems to be entirely voice-acted. I wouldn’t say that either the audio quality or the performances are top tier across the board, but it’s all good enough. There are a lot of really fun accents and deliveries to the jokes, and the occasional echoes in the recordings feel like they fit right in with the retro aesthetic.
As far as I’ve seen so far, the narrative thrust is really slow in Quest for Infamy. There are a lot of fun bits of story to unlock in and around the town, but I’m not sure I’ve uncovered the main plot yet. Still, the writing is fun enough that I’m enjoying exploring even if I’m not quite sure what I’m actually trying to achieve.
Spectacular on Switch
The Switch is my absolute favorite way to play video games in general, but not everything transitions from PC to Nintendo’s handheld exceptionally well. Quest of Infamy plays absolutely wonderful on the small screen.
Rather than trying to reimagine the mouse-based controls to make the game feel like it was designed with a controller in mind, Quest for Infamy has you moving a cursor around the screen with your analog stick, changing which action you have selected using the shoulder buttons, and clicking with A. This system works absolutely perfectly, even if it makes it clear that you’re playing a game designed for PC on a console. Which is fine. Because you are.
If you pull your Switch out of the dock you can even play using the touch screen, although that didn’t feel quite right to me. In order to change your clicking action using the touch screen, you have to move your “mouse” to the top of the screen to bring down a bar with the different actions on it. Since you both move the mouse and click it by touching the screen, it’s a little hard to be specific in that action. It’s workable, especially since you’re not really dealing with anything fast-paced, but it didn’t feel as nice as the controller did.
Final Thoughts
I can tell that I’ve barely scratched the surface of Quest for Infamy, but I’ve liked everything about it so far. I do wish I had a little bit more sense of where I was supposed to go next, but since the game plays so well and the writing is a lot of fun, being lost has never really bothered me. I’m excited to see more of this game, but I’m hoping that there’s a stronger plot hook on the horizon to keep me coming back to it.
If you grew up on point-and-click games and haven’t gotten around to trying this one on PC yet it’s worth a pickup, and the Switch version is easy to recommend.
You can watch TroytlePower's first moments with Quest for Infamy below!