[Review] Quest for Infamy - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Infamous Quests
Published By: Ratalaika Games
Categories: RPG, Adventure, Point and Click
Release Date: 03.04.22

I’m truly at odds about how I feel about Quest for Infamy. I find myself enjoying a lot of Adventure games, I did grow up playing them, but something seems just…quite off about it.

Lets start with the fact that Quest for Infamy is old school. Very, very old school. It looks rather old too, but this I imagine is all by design. This is a relatively recent game, just now getting a Switch port, but I’d personally say, despite being able to use the touch screen, this game might be better on a PC. It’s a point and click, which is a given that’d it’d be better on PC. You have all of the options you would in this kind of game. Look, touch, speak, attack, run.

The issue I find, is that you cycle though them. So if you want to move somewhere, you need to select the move option. There’s more than one movement option, each having their own use, walk, run, and sneak. Thankfully those are their own cycle. So say you walk up to a door, you can’t just walk into it to go in a building, you then need to cycle to the touch button. To talk to people, you then cycle to talk. It’s not too complicated, but considering what other games were doing at the time, this is obtusely un-user friendly. Nevermind that you’ll often have to be pretty precise for certain actions, including if you want to move to certain areas.

Quest for Infamy on Switch is frankly an ugly game. It’s hideous, it seems that the sprite resolution was super tiny and then stretched up so it looks off on the Switch’s screen. If this wasn’t a classic point and click, it’d be fine in my opinion to just lower how much screen real-estate it uses, but alas, you get some muddy, blown out looking sprites. But here’s the thing, I don’t think the spritework is even that bad. It’s colorful, it’s detailed, but man does it really look like the 90’s games it was inspired by. This all can lead to an issue that plagues the gameplay as well. Since backgrounds are static, like a fixed camera angle, certain paths you can go to are obscures or just plain hard to grasp. Do I tap here? Oh, I tap slightly up and he’ll walk to a new screen.

So…what do I like? Well, this game is hilarious. The writing is superb. You play as Roehm. Roehm is er…not a good guy. He’s a jackass to put it bluntly. A real jerk, a villain. The introduction even has him trying to seduce a very angry man’s daughter. He’s quick to snap back at people coming at him, and even straight up calls the man who just carried out an execution an asshole. There’s a lot of dialog in this game, all of it which I might add is voiced. The voice acting is pretty good too. Everyone has something to say about something. Just be sure to get on the good sides of people.

There’s some turn based combat in the game. It gets the job done, you can tell that most of the focus went towards the more adventure game esqe moments. However, this can showcase how more open the game gets. You don’t just have to play with your sword as a Brigand? Want to be a Sorcerer or Rogue? Each has their own gameplay style in and out of combat. You’ll get a decent handout of minigames too, which I enjoyed playing. Maybe it’s just trying really hard as you drink more and more to get the right selection. Sometimes it’s archery or matching cards. However, the matching cards one to even become a sorcerer is a tad annoying. So you get three mistakes and then you get booted out, to which makes you cycle though your actions again back to speak. Then having to wait, listen to the same dialog, wait, etc…

There is something ultimately refreshing about how branched out this game lets you do things, not just choosing your path of abilities, but your path of pure arse-ness.

I found myself not quite really enjoying myself. The writing makes me want to go deeper and deeper, but the archaic gameplay keeps me from having the ambition to play this. That mixed with the game’s seemingly shoddy performance with hitches and long pauses. Perhaps using a mouse on a PC would make me feel better. Alas, there’s no such privilege on the Switch to do this to my knowledge. Play this game on PC. I might actually do that myself.

Update: When attempting to grab more screengrabs, I found my saves to be gone. I’m not too thrilled to replay anything. While, for fans of the genre, I’d definitely say give it a go, I’d probably not get this on Switch however. Unless issues are fixed.