I wish to express my ponderance over Brok the InvestiGator, a truly wondrous videoludic experience. A many-faced entity upon which I cannot stop gawking in bewilderment.
This reptilian bonanza is the second game developed by French Auteur Fabrice 'COWCAT' Breton after Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure. On paper, it's about a croco-gator (actual species unknown) who's an investigator, as the title suggests. He solves mysteries, beats up the bad guys, makes a few wisecracks and all that jazz. He's got a nerdy sidekick, a teenage son and a dark past. You would be forgiven to marinate in the false belief that anything about such a vague premise would imply any level of conventionality... but do not be fooled! Beyond its approachable yet unassuming Disney Afternoon aesthetics lies a much deeper truth.
This work is unlike anything you have ever seen and, at the same time, it is exactly like every other game you might have played before. As in, it's all of the games, all at once!
It's a Point & Click Adventure, a classic Arcade Beat 'Em Up, a Action RPG with a multiple choice system and relationship mechanics, and an Ace Attorney style VN collectively rolled into one particularly twisted pretzel! There is also an Escape Room smack-dabbed in the middle of it, because why not? Streets of Rage meets Deus Ex meets Disco Elysium meets Professor Layton meets Chrono Trigger (inexplicably) and they all get drunk together in a world that looks like an episode of TaleSpin after The Bombs from Fallout dropped. Yes, you should be confused. Yes, you should also be afraid.
It's a funny, furry animal comedy but also a raw family drama. It's a Neo-Noir mystery but also Post-Apocalyptic and Post-Humanity. It's a colourful cartoon but also a dire Cyberpunk setting. It's Saturday morning's Sonic the Hedgehog but also Redwall - and that includes some of the more problematic aspects.
This is the sort of fiction that will have its main character, who looks like a buff Wally Gator, go through episodes of depression and trauma. It's also the kind of interactive diegesis that lets you jump on a corpse, repeatedly, while sleuthing a murder case. You do get an achievement for it.
When you vivisect the body, pick it apart piece by piece, you might come to appreciate the work that went into its many moving parts. The sections classified as 'Point & Click' present well-designed puzzles with different solutions to keep them fresh whilst the brawling parts work as a smooth alternative to the puzzling that are fun and accessible. The real problem arises when everything else comes up to clog up its digestive tract. For example: the aforementioned Escape Room portion is fine on its own right but antithetic to the rest of the game's ethos because it can only be solved in a specific way (or, alternatively, skipped) whereas most of the other scenarios present multiple solutions to the same riddle.
Bizarrely, there is only one murder investigation in this supposed title about a detective, and it's actually quite good. So much so that I would have wished it was a central feature rather than a gimmicky deviation from the confused plotline(s).
It's made worse by the notion that you can actually point to the wrong culprit and continue the game normally, only to have the solution spoilt afterwards. Again, that happens because Brok has a multiple choices system, which is good for replay value but bad for storytelling.
The scrambled nature of its mechanical inner workings is reflected in the erratic composition of its narrative. On that note, to say that there is too much meat on the grill would be embarrassingly euphemistic: it's wild that this game exists as it is, as the unfiltered, unrestrained, overly ambitious "first draft" of a genre-bending Epic that's ultimately too big for its own britches. A story that, within its limited means, attempts to comment on Social Inequality, Pollution, Eugenics, Capitalism, Racial Profiling, the Surveillance State, Technological Intrusion, the Human Condition, even Gender Politics, and comically fumbles all over these subjects with the grace of an inebriated hippopotamus.
It shoots for the Moon and hits the Sun with a rocket fueled by convoluted writing, a dissonant tone, an uneven structure and bizarre pacing. Furthermore, the brightly coloured aesthetics and child-friendly, rounded character designs don't complement the tone and ambition for which Brok is aiming. In order for any of this to work, some major cuts and rewrites would have been necessary. Yet, at the same time, I don't think I would want this game to be any different than the baffling creature that it is, charming in its many shortcomings. I simply respect it too much for that. Brok the Investigator is a labour of love, well and truly. A Magnum Opus birthed upon this world through the sheer persistence and uncompromising will of its author, who categorically refused to cut corners or change anything to make it more "digestible." It might be flawed in its execution (severely flawed, in fact) and the way certain characters from a perceived, in-universe minority are portrayed should definitely be put under scrutiny, but I still admire the effort on display.
'Tis a beast of true innovation that comes together in a weirdly malformed way. You could theoretically slash it into several different genre pieces and they would be decent yet forgettable on their own, but it's by containing all of them at once that this game achieves Artistic Immortality!
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