If there’s anything I love more than a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:visual novel that makes me solve a gruesome mystery, it’s a silly visual novel that does the same thing. I’ve played 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:all three Danganronpa titles, I love the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ace Attorney series, and Paranormasight consumed me whole after half the staff here at TheGamer put it on their Game of the Year lists. I fancy myself something of a gumshoe when 🗹it comes to off-center visual🦩 mystery novels.

Because of my passion for this beloved but sometimes 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:tough-to-satisfy niche, Chicken Police has been on my radar for quite some time. The first game, Chicken Police: Paint It Red, came out back in 2020 to massive acclaim, still sitting at a perfect 10/10 rating on Steam four years ꧙post-launch.

It’s been on my wishlist for a while, but with a back catalog numbering in the dozens at this point, I just haven’t gotten around to playing it. But when I received an invitation to come check out a previe🐈w of the game’s upcoming sequel, Chicken Police: Into the Hive, at PAX East this year, I accepted almost too eagerly.

Chicken Police was my final appointment in an excellent but very, very long weekend, and I was looking forward to having some time to just put on a pair of headphones at the game’s booth on the show floor and zone out int💙o some goofiness before calling it a con. There was a save file a bit further along that I could have chosen to checkཧ out, but figuring I would probably already have enough spoiled by playing the sequel before the original, I dove beak-first into a new game to start all over from (chicken) scratch.

Chicken Police is styled as a classic '40s film noir, and detective work just keeps piling up for my grizzled, tired police officer protagonist, Sonny. My first task was to find my partner, Marty, who I located outside of his apartment block. He was completely drunk and shouting up at the girlfriend who was currently in the process of kicking him out of their apartment as I arrived. I got his attention by lobbing a baseball at the back of his head so we could head down to the precinct together for some off♍icial busi𒈔ness.

Immediately on arrival, we were met with the rival detective team, a smug wolf named Moses and his affable cat sidekick Plato, who told us we could find Monica, the department secretary and feline friend we’d come to see, over at the shooting range. Sonny, worried by the news that this usually peaceful pussycat was off at target practice, led the way to find her as she open fired on the range. She refused to answer hi🃏s questions and refused to ask any as we requested her help getting the paperwork that would allow us into the off-limits area of the city, The Hive.

In order to navigate, I needed to point and click on various things like in most visual novels, but what stood out the🧔 most to me was the conversational style and how exhaustive it required you to be. I’m used to sprites appearing when a character has a line or two to say in games like this, but what was unique to me about Chicken Police was how many branching options I had for talking to those around me.

Plenty of the conversations I needed to have unfurled naturally, with Moses and Plato slowly giving me more breadcrumbs of information on how to find Monica, and I took hints or points of interest from their comments. I’d ask one of them a questio💟n, they’d answer, and I suddenly had three more questions I was able to ask between the two. I’m not sure yet how exactly my responses affected Moses and Plato in terms of their responses, but it felt dynamic enough to be natural, even if I was playing as a chicken talking to a wolf about cop stuff.

I was told that the premise of Into the Hive sees Sonny and Marty needing to infiltrate the insect-centric region of The Hive, described as the “insect underworld.” There’s a mystery in the Wilderness, the city where the visual novel takes place, that links back to The Hive in some way🎐, and Sonny has an inkling early on that something about this stinks.

In the trailer that played on repeat for convention-goers on large television screens along the perimeter of developer Joystick Venture’s booth, I saw a deadly serious-looking monkey corner a large, humanoid bug wearing a suit and fedora in an alleyway and murder it in cold, weirdly yellowish blood. I was warned going into the demo that the happenings in The Hive are on track to impact the entire world in Chicken Police, and I might n💜ot know what that means yet, but I definitely .

Playing a demo of the sequel was the spark I needed to head back to my hotel and purchase the first game for my plane ride home the next morning. There was an unavoidable spoiler about something that happened at the end of the first game that has the WIlderness’ police officers of all species on edge, and I might know what happens, but I can’t imagine how. As excited as I am to figure out what’s already taken place, I’m even more eager to fin💖d out where the series is going from here 𓄧when Chicken Police: Into the Hive gets a full release later this year.