[Gamescom 2018] 3 Minutes to Midnight - Tested the new Adventure Game from Scarecrow Studio

Sometimes indie games are more satisfying than a triple A and I think that's the case; in these years I have played several Adventure games, but none have left me pleasantly impressed how 3 Minutes to Midnight, title tested in these days during the Gamescom 2018.

In the game we will play the role of a young girl named Betty Anderson and we will be catapulted into a city where everyone, including herself, has lost their memory overnight. Thanks to the mayor of the city, as well as our mother, we will have to understand who we are, where we are and what happened in order to complete the story in the best possible way. The game will be divided into a main plot, a hidden sub-plot and mini-plots regarding the characters we will meet.; these will not be necessary for the completion of the game, but they will still be important for understanding the psychologies of the other characters and their way of behaving. In fact, only by fully knowing how a certain character is made will we also know how to behave in order to extort important information from him for the success of the game.

As for the gameplay, I have found the choice of making the character interact with the world using only two buttons is very appropriate: the left one, which will allow us to interact with objects and what surrounds us, and the right one, which will allow us to find even better clues and elements of the game. The menu is presented to us in a very simple way, with boxes that contain the elements that, after being collected, can also be merged together to create new objects useful to proceed in the story.

During the demo I found myself in a sort of summer camp on the lake in a nocturnal setting and there I came across a raccoon, Pam-Clarisse & Lisa (three personalities who share poor Pam's body) and the monster hunter Smoky. The lines of dialogue range from the most politically correct to the most hilarious, and I can tell you without any fear that I didn't laugh so much since Monkey Island 3. Of course the dialogues are dynamic and change according to the progress of the story, both in relation to which character we will speak first: having spoken first with the raccoon and then with Pam, the girl will have a line linked to the raccoon; in reverse, speaking with her first, the raccoon will let us know his thoughts on Pam, Clarisse and Lisa.

3 Minutes to Midnight is in fact a game with all the credentials to be an excellent Adventure Game and I hope you are as impatient as I am for this new indie. The title is unfortunately still in development, but I have been guaranteed that it will be released around the first summer months of next year and will be available for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.