Loco Motive: An Exquisite Pixel Art Throwback Adventure

Every now and then, an indie game developer proves that you don’t need millions and a Lucas Ranch to create a lovely pixel art throwback point & click adventure game. Loco Motive by Robust Games could just as well be a hallmark model that proves my point. Made with love by only a handful of passionate folks and released at the tail end of 2024, Loco Motive is yet another great adventure game we get treated with this year. The point & click genre is far from dead and perhaps even getting a bit crowded!

So what makes Loco Motive stand out? As soon as you start playing, you’ll immediately be struck by the amazing pixel art, especially the goofy animations such as your avatar putting too large objects into their trousers. Does this sound familiar? Hello again, Monkey Island fanboys. The still screenshots included here do not do the game any justice. There are many recent pixelated throwback point & click games, but there are only a handful that manage to hit the nail on the head, especially when it comes to the richness of the animations.

Second, the voice acting is pristine and really helps drag you into this seven-chapter long whodunnit with its obligatory story twists and turns. Judging from the long list of names at the ending credits, Robust Games managed to hire a great cast of voice actors, regardless of their status as non-AAA devs.

As with any proper LucasArts/Film pint & click tribute, Loco Motive does not take itself too seriously. There’s more laughs than edge-seating to be done in this murder mystery that’s more Guybrush Threepwood than Gabriel Knight. The game starts with you controlling Arthur Ackerman, the personal attorney of Lady Unterwald who owns an empire everyone seems to be eyeing on. She’s prepared a will reading aboard her own technologically advanced steam engine train—hence the title of the game.

Unfortunately for her, before announcing any inheritors, she’s of course murdered. Arthur isn’t a detective but tries to do his best anyway and is helped along the way with a colourful cast of which some you also can eventually gain control of. Perhaps that’s already a bit of a spoiler so before totally ruining the experience, I’ll leave the story for you to discover.

Robust Games must have recently played Return to Monkey Island, as the game automatically highlights hot spots in a room you can interact with. As you hover over them, or select them in the Switch version using the right analogue stick, a suggestive reaction is already shown without yet choosing the action. Terrible Toybox invented this with Return to Monkey Island to nudge the player in the right direction and to get rid of the “try everything with everything” practice.

As I wrote in the review then, I do not like this practice as it gives away which object to focus on and which one just is flavour text. Funnily enough, in one particular case, Loco Motive ignores its own best practice, causing confusion to the player: is this just for fun and giggles? The auto-text says so, but it turns out I really need to use this! Whoops, what a mistaka to a-maka. It doesn’t go as far as Return to Monkey Island: hovering an object in your inventory over a hotspot doesn’t automatically reveal a red cross saying you’re doing it wrong. In another case, we wanted to combine something with a window, and even though the game virtually tells you to do so when you’re looking out of it, there was no diamond-shaped hot spot there.

There were other occasions where the UI hampered our experience, such as the characters moving backwards for no reason or the decision to overlay the inventory on top of the entire screen like in The Curse of Monkey Island. What a weird decision to make the same design mistake as a nineties adventure game while all other newly released ones tackle this in a better way? Oh, and that inventory screen has no scrollbar and yes, you can drag too much stuff with you, and yes, in many occasions we forgot to scroll up.

These UI quirks are irritating but forgivable given the near-flawless execution of the story (besides the weird pacing issues of the first two chapters compared to the last few), the art, and the sound design. I loved the jazzy soundtrack as well. It’s available on Bandcamp—listen to Don’s Quarters for example, does this remind you of something? Either the general Grim Fandango vibes or certain specific locations deep within the Caribbean… As Paul Zimmerman, the composer, writes:

The soundtrack features a mix of genres combining swinging’ Jazz, Film-Noir orchestral elements and spy-music tropes. Lots of saxophones and muted trumpets in here!

The album is an easy buy for me that’s ideal to whistle along while typing away.

I played Loco Motive together with my wife and highly encourage you to play long with a friend as well. It’s one of the better recent original adventure games we encountered—and now that I scroll through my past adventure games playlist, perhaps only bested by the grandmaster himself.