A Golden Wake is the first commercially available game produced by Grundislav Games. This retro-style adventure game, available on Steam since October 9, is designed to take you back to the Roaring Twenties.
Prohibition, Land Boom, and Corruption
A Golden Wake tells a story of wealth, corruption, and the real-estate industry in 1920s Miami. It all begins as Prohibition is being instituted across the United States. In Miami, the new law is for the most part ignored, and so thousands of Americans are making their way to the sunny town in South Florida. This in turn causes the Florida Land Boom, which the game’s main character, real estate agent Alfie Banks, is hoping to profit from as he moves to Miami from New York.
In Miami he meets George E. Merrick, and after doing a few preliminary tasks for Merrick to gain his trust, Alfie is employed as a real estate agent and the story takes off. A Golden Wake covers a total of 20 years in the lives of its characters, which of course only works because the plot takes regular leaps forward in time. These jumps can sometimes be a bit confusing and mess with the flow of the game. However, one advantage of them is that in each chapter you can always see what your actions in the previous chapter have done to affect your surroundings, sometimes considerably so. And of course this is also an incentive to go on the Internet and read about those events which are not depicted in the game.
A somewhat different kind of history lesson
I’m sure anyone who’s somewhat familiar with the history of Miami will have picked up on the name George E. Merrick. The really cool thing about the storyline is that it’s faithful to actual events from the history of Miami, which means that you encounter real historical people and real places in the game. At the end of the game there’s even a photo comparison between the in-game characters and the actual people they’re supposed to represent, and it’s really clear just how similar they look, and how much effort the developers invested into the game’s details. History lovers will be glad to know the game also includes written biographies of the interesting characters and personalities portrayed in the game.
In any event, at the end of the game (about 5-6 hours), you get the feeling that you’ve actually learned something, and didn’t simply play a video game. The replay value is increased by the fact that you can play through the game again with developer commentary and keep trying to unlock all the Steam achievements, as you’re unlikely to get all of them in the first go-round.
The puzzles of a real estate agent
The controls you use to guide Alfie Banks through the game are actually pretty minimalistic. Only the mouse is used – the left button is used to interact with characters and objects and the right mouse button is used to investigate objects. You open your inventory by moving the mouse cursor to the top corner of the screen, where you can select one of the objects and use it to interact with your surroundings or open a menu. Another great thing is that there’s an independent save function, which means you can save the game at any time, instead of having to reach checkpoints or something similar.
The puzzles in A Golden Wake are not especially difficult to solve, and there aren’t any particularly innovative tricks, either. Of course, it’s not such a bad thing that the puzzles are relatively easy, as the game has no real help system. Some of the trickier puzzles do actually offer the possibility of getting tips to help you solve them, but this option is not available for all of them.
In any event, the mini-games are pretty diverse and fit really well into the overall concept. For example, there’s one puzzle that has you help potential buyers find the right house by combining their wishes with descriptions of various houses. Then a bit later there’s a scene that has you finding certain things in a house in order to point out its shortcomings. Or there are certain things that must be done in a certain order so that you can do something else, like when you have to solve a puzzle in a bookshelf in order to gain access to a hidden compartment in the wall. And of course you also have to talk to other characters in order to get clues out of them.
Pixelated beauty in the jazz era
The graphics in A Golden Wake are done in a retro style that might take a bit of getting used to at first if you’re used to the graphic capabilities of other modern games. Most of the time it’s all about nicer graphics and better performance than the competition, but in this case the pixelated retro graphics fit into the overall concept really well, and after a little while they have a charm all their own. Backgrounds are filled with lots of details, and while not everything contributes to the story directly, they do provide further information on the era the game is set in.
Another major plus is the game’s soundtrack, which features jazz music and a typical 1920s sound. Everything just fits together remarkably well. And then there are the colorful voice actors that really bring the characters to life. Unfortunately for international gamers, however, the game is only available in English at this time.
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