The Drifter on Switch 2 is the most bingeable game I’ve played this year

I’d heard good things about The Drifter before it landed on Switch 2, and its blend of modern pixel art and nostalgic Lucasfilm/LucasArts writing already ticks boxes, but what surprises me, apart from the engaging story, cosy puzzles and excellent pixel art, is how effortlessly it all works on Nintendo’s handheld.

Made on Powerhoof’s own adventure engine running on Unity, this is a classic point-and-click adventure for modern times, a genre that can be clumsy, fiddly and over-designed in the wrong hands, where its interface can get in the way, which isn’t the case with The Drifter. This game’s controls are perfectly simple and leave you to just enjoy the puzzles, gags and story.

The right stick can be twirled to ‘scan’ rooms for interactive objects, highlights characters worth talking to, and once you’ve exhausted an interaction, it simply drops away. There’s none of that scrubbing every corner of the screen looking for a tiny hotspot or wondering whether you’ve somehow missed the one item needed to progress. The right trigger activates a point of interest, and right and left triggers can combine items – and it’s all just very easy.

The point and the clicks

That UX/UI smoothness would mean very little if the game itself wasn’t worth playing, but The Drifter grabs hold of you almost immediately and refuses to let go. Every chapter ends with another twist, another revelation, another problem teased for protagonist Mick Carter, and before long I was falling into the same trap over and over again, obsessed with uncovering the next secret, plot twist, or puzzle solution. Then another cliffhanger lands, and suddenly it’s midnight. The Drifter’s writing is paced like a great Netflix series, and it’s equally bingable.

It helps that Mick is one of those protagonists whose personality is clearly defined by the writing and art. His pixel-art pose is permanently slumped forward as though life has physically bent his spine, and his default response to most situations is some variation of “this is bullshit”. The game’s story and world keep throwing increasingly impossible problems at him, and, for most of the game, he’d clearly rather be anywhere else; indeed, that’s the underlying character flaw, as it’s revealed he ran away from his responsibilities as a husband and never reconciled with his son’s death.

Unfortunately for Mick, he’s drawn back home for his mother’s funeral and stuck, caught in a conspiracy involving secret scientific experiments, urban legends, shadowy organisations, and all manner of weirdness that feels ripped from a John Carpenter movie or Stephen King short story. The more absurd things become, the more invested Mick gets, the harder it becomes for him to leave, and so it is for me.

Happy Death Day the game

What really sells all of The Drifter’s story is the writing, which I know sounds glib, but so many games have great stories but can’t land the hits because the writing fails to give meaning, purpose, or depth to anything. But in The Drifter, I found every corner of the game a joy; the cast around Mick, for example, is fantastically colourful. They’re argumentative, sarcastic, occasionally sweet, often exasperated, and almost everyone – the journalist looking for a juicy story, the sister hiding a secret, the dry detective – seems to have a joke at Mick’s expense in the locker and ready to go.

The pixel art brings these character moments and plot twists to life too, because it’s so expressive and perfectly timed. Small animations tell you everything you need to know about a scene, whether it’s Mick sneaking into a journalist’s office on tiptoes in a wonderfully ridiculous Scooby-Doo shuffle or the tiny details like when he picks himself out of a bin hand over hand slowly or huffs, puffs and shrugs at yet more extreme nonsense he has to endure – he has a real hate-hate relationship with computers. It’s the extremes too: a joke and eyes to the sky one moment, and minutes later, he could be suffering another horrendous death.

Ah yes, the graphically comical deaths… The central mystery of The Drifter revolves around a secret time-travel project, but there’s a catch: to jump through time, somebody has to die, usually in the most immediate and sudden way possible. Which means Mick spends much of the game being shot, drowned, poisoned, crushed, impaled, broken, thrown off buildings and generally subjected to every terrible fate imaginable.

One death sees him plummet from an office block before his head bounces off a bin while another has him shot directly in the head. At one point he shoots himself in the head. It becomes a running gag, albeit a particularly gruesome one, and the game’s pixel artists somehow manage to make every horrible demise entertaining and fun in a gory Looney Tunes kind of way. By the final stretch, The Drifter is having enormous fun with the idea, as in the last twenty minutes, the game practically encourages you to kill Mick in increasingly bizarre ways to solve a problem. It has the same gleeful energy as Happy Death Day, where each new demise is designed to get more graphic and weird than the last.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot because discovering where it goes is half the fun, but what impressed me most is that it actually runs a complete arc and manages a satisfying ending. Adventure games, mystery stories and time-travel narratives all have a habit of collapsing under their own ambition as the plot draws on, but The Drifter keeps piling on twists and putting its characters through hell, and it moves in a natural way where, sure, Mick is now seeing ghosts and demons and is being prepped for brain surgery by a serial killer, but it all makes sense.

A perfect balance

The puzzles help, too, as they’re logical, compartmentalised and rarely leave you carrying random junk hours after you needed it. Compared to some ‘point-and-click’ adventures, The Drifter feels lean and focused. There are a few moments where you can see the gears turning beneath the surface, where an object conveniently appears only after a particular conversation trigger, but honestly they’re so rare I barely cared. The game keeps moving, the story keeps escalating, the puzzles do exactly what they need to do, and the controls never get in the way.

That’s probably why I enjoyed The Drifter so much on Switch 2, as it feels perfectly suited to the handheld. Pick it up, play a chapter, get hooked by a cliffhanger, promise yourself you’ll stop after the next one, then realise you’ve accidentally spent three hours discovering he was really that and she was really doing that all along and, well… twists. Oh, and watching Mick discover new and inventive ways to die.

And it’s that dark, dry humour, where most games try very hard to keep their hero alive, that really makes The Drifter entertaining, and it’s a reason to stick around.