Chicken Police: Into the Hive piqued my interest immediately. A point-and-click meets visual novel film noir detective adventure with anthropomorphic characters? Sign me up. I knew I had to check it out at Gamescom last week.
I’ve always loved point-and-click games, with Monkey Island, Broken Sword, and Discworld being firm favourites f𝓡rom my childhood. It’s a genre I still adore, but over the years its modern titles possess far more hand-holding. If you can&r💞squo;t figure something out, the game will likely highlight or signpost the solution, and you’ll soon be on your merry way.
Gone are the days of calling some premium hotline when you got stuck. You don’t even need to Google the solution half the time, as puzzle games now often include a hint system. I used to lament the endless cycle of clicking t🐭hrough combinations of items or shuffling around the same few scenes and speaking to every possible character repeatedly to try and figure out what I was missing. I don’t know whether I’m just a glutton for punishment, but now I miss that aspect of point-and-click games. Sure, it used to get frustrating, but each time you solved a puzzle for yourself after being stuck for so long, it felt that much sweeter.
Thankfully, The Wild Gentlemen’s Into the Hive is like the point-and-click classics of my childhood. Sometimes, you must speak to the same character multiple times to get the necessary information to progress. You don’t just have an interact button when it comes to characters, either. You can examine characters, speak with them, or follow up on specific leads. This multi-actioไn system is anoth𝓀er throwback to golden oldies.
That’s not to say that Into the Hive doesn’t embrace some more modern ideas. There are difficulty settings so you can toggle whether you want to have a few mor🔯e tries at an interrogation scene before failing. Unlike many point-and-click games with only one linear narrative, Into the Hive features an optional quest log, and completing these additional little requests can impact some core scenes. It’s a great way to learn more about the world of the Wilderness and its inhabitants.
Into the Hive exudes a slick classic film noir style, almost to the point of parody, but never in a bad way. It features full voice acting with more than 20 hours of spoken dialogue. It has those stereotypical nasally voices you immediately imagine when you think of gangsters and detective films from the ‘30 and ‘40s, much like how Home Alone tapped into these tr🔥opes for its fake Angels with Filthy Souls movie. It also utilises splashes of colour sparingly in its black-and-white graphics for added flair.
Style is balanced well with humour, with Into the Hiv🍰e creating colourful and comedic dialogue, even to the point of poking fun of itself with characters making quips about having to combine items, as well as censoring curse 🙈words by swapping them out for suitable chicken-like alternatives, like ‘cluckin’ dark’.
I spoke with The Wild Ge🥀ntlemen co-founder, writer, director, and designer Bálint Bánk Varga about our shared love of classic point and clicks, with Varga telling m🅘e that Grim Fandango, LucasArts’ 1998 film noir point-and-click, played a part in inspiring Chicken Police. As for the quirkier aspect of anthropomorphic characters, Varga told me that idea came from watching a viral video of a rabbit and a chicken fighting titled ‘Chicken Police’. Yes, I Googled this to watch it after we spoke.
Into the Hive is a sequel to Chicken Police: Paint It Red, though Varga tells me you don’t need to have played the first to appreciate this game. There are recurring characters and references, but each can b🌌e played as a standalone adventure. Varga also tells me that Into the Hive will take about seven to eight hours to complete, much like the first game, though new to the sequel is Technicolour Mode, whic🌼h allows players to add full colour to their game.
Chicken Police: Into the Hive is . If you find the idea of this ode to classic poin🅰t-and-click games tempting and don’t want to wait, you can check out and start solving cases with Sonny and Marty immediately.