Heir of the Dog, a point-and-click adventure game from Lucy Dreaming developer Tall Story Games, has hit its Kickstarter campaign goal of £15,000 in under 2 hours. At the time of writing, the game sits at just over £20,000, with a comfortable 28 days left on the campaign.
The developer’s previous game raised over £25,000 with its campaign, and Heir of the Dog looks set to beat that in no time. The title is inspired by Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson but takes a comical approach to its story. Set in Victorian London, the game follows upper class twit Cummerbund Bandersnatch after he sneaks into his uncle’s laboratory and does something nobody should ever do. He drinks a strange liquid without thinking twice about what it might be.
Two sides to the same character
The Kickstarter was funded so fast that it blew the developer’s expectations out of the water. Tall Story Games is run by a solo developer called Tom Hardwidge who works on his games while his wife lends her years of marketing skills to the company to help broadcast its titles.
Bandersnatch knowingly drinks a strange fluid that promises the drinker a good time, but the effects aren’t exactly what he’d imagine they’d be. From that point on, Bandersnatch swaps between his human form in the day and a much more beastial one at night. This is one of the game’s core mechanics, allowing players to solve puzzles in ingenious ways by switching between night and day.
The nostalgic pixel art looks great and can be admired alongside classic point-and-click game controls, though you can upgrade to modern controls if that’s what you prefer. You can get a taste for exactly what the game has in store by playing the demo right now, experimenting with the controls and systems to see if this is a title you want to see through to the end.
There are some wild Kickstarter rewards that backers can get their hands on. There is, of course, a cheaper base pledge that will get you the game and a Discord role, but it’s the physical rewards that boggle my mind. There’s a USB cassette filled with digital rewards, a printed map, big boxed versions of Heir of the Dog and Lucy Dreaming, and even a monocle.
While I don’t think I’ll be dropping £600 on the Kickstarter to secure my monocle, this game is right up my alley, with Dominic Armarto of Monkey Island fame lending his skills to the project as well as its point-and-click controls and pixel artwork, there’s certainly a lot to love and tempt any fan of the genre into a pledge.
