The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy®

Just spent the weekend playing this, the game is definitely in the right direction, it has a lot of references and Easter eggs to old games and popular icons from the 80's and 90's. The story line was entertaining, the riddles logical, though I would have liked a few more difficult ones. I would also have enjoyed a little more interaction with items in the background even if you just had the option of looking at them. Voice acting was good, so were the graphics and user interface, the music was very nice, with some monkey island influences. All in all it was quite, good, I just wish there was more!

Playing Dog Mendonca, it's hard criticizing it as a game, since it doesn't seem to want to be a game. It seems more like a short introduction into the world of the character, and that it might as well have been a comic-book, an audio-drama or maybe even a short cartoon. Playing this game is fairly easy, and even if you're struggling you have a notebook in your inventory that tells you exactly how to solve each puzzle. You also can't interact with too many things in your environment, and you usually don't need to interact with items more than once. And if an item stays in your inventory after you used it, it means you need to use it again later on. Not to say it's a bad game - the artwork is amazing and the voice-over is very good, but the game is just too simple to be much fun. You do get an interesting mechanic to try by having to interrogate people, hopefully causing them to slip up and divulge important information, but it's implemented so poorly, you might as well try every dialogue tree until coming across the right ones. Trying to find the best approach to an investigation is more guesswork than deduction. There is also a fighting mechanic, but it's fairly easy to master, and only serves as nostalgia for the NES era. But my biggest gripe with this game is its lack of focus. It introduces a slew of characters, but most of them are non-playable and superfluous. The game being so easy, each area you'll encounter will include as few interactions as possible with as many characters as possible. This game just seems to throw everything but the kitchen sink at you, in the hopes of introducing you to the complete universe of Dog Mendonca - witches, demons, werewolves, an invisible man, gargoyles, monsters, gypsy curses and so on and so on. It makes everything feels detached, and the mystery to become less interesting. It also doesn't help that being introduced to four main characters, you only get to play one - Pizza Boy, the most uninteresting in the group.

The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonca and Pizza Boy is a very long title for a relatively short game, but hey – I’d rather have a short fun game than a long and boring one. Besides, even the best game can get tedious after 50 or so hours, and over the years I’ve come to appreciate “short and sweet” games more and more. Dog Mendonca is a old-school point & click adventure game based on a series of comics I’ve never read or even heard of before. In fact, my biggest problem with the game is probably that it doesn’t really do anything to introduce the player to its world and characters, a peculiar team of occult private detectives dealing with a whole underground community of monsters and magic. Fortunately, the concept of such supernatural sleuths is hardly unique, so familiarity with clichés of the genre comes in good stead of familiarity with this particular setting. The plot starts of as almost every detective story ever, with a beautiful woman in trouble entering the private eye’s office looking for help. From there we’ll encounter a few twists and turns but, it’s all rather classic “film noir” stuff, just with supernatural stuff and equally classic Monkey Island-esque humor typical of point & click adventure games. And if, like me, you like games like that, it’s a safe bet you’ll have a whale of a time with Dog Mendonca. The puzzles are well designed (a bit easy, but I’ll take “easy and logical” over “insane” any day of the week), the writing pretty good with mostly decent voice acting, and the graphics are just straight up beautiful, at least if you like this sort of cartoonish 2D look. The only real letdown here, as is unfortunately the case with many a crime mystery, is that the resolution to the whole intrigue doesn’t make sense. Still, getting to that ending, while not exactly the greatest adventure of my life, was a fun, enjoyable ride.

The visuals and atmosphere are great! Unfortunately it starts going down hill from there. The English voice acting is pretty bad and the lack of sound production is very noticeable at times. The story and the puzzles are okay, the interrogation mechanic is rarely used; Which I guess is good since it's pretty simple and tedious. One puzzle in particular pissed me off, I'll keep it vague to avoid spoiling anything, but you should be able to use a hammer to remove a nailed item, not what you end up using. Unless I missed something, you can't make the character walk faster, which is also super annoying when you have to backtrack.