REVIEW: The Drifter's thrilling pulp action takes a step forward for modern point and clicks

Point and click adventure games will never die. I'm certain of it. The last few years have seen some of the best games in the genre, and Powerhoof's The Drifter might stand atop the pile as one of my favorites of them all.

This gritty cinematic point and click immerses you with incredible presentation tricks that feel like an evolution of the genre in much the same way VGG-favorite Amarantus was for visual novels.

The wait was worth it.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Powerhoof

Publisher: Powerhoof

​Platform(s): PC

​Price: $19.99

Release Date: July 17, 2025

Review key provided by Strange Signals.

King, Carpenter, Powerhoof

The Drifter is the longtime project of Powerhoof, in development since their most well-known release: 2017's local multiplayer dungeon crawler, Crawl. The team is made up of artist/coder duo Barney Cumming and Dave Lloyd, but like a lot of indie teams these days, many collaborators and contractors left their fingerprints on this eight-year development cycle.

In that near-decade, Powerhoof not only tinkered away on The Drifter, but also on the engine it's built on, PowerQuest. By breaking free of the usual adventure game engines out there, these devs were able to build exactly what they wanted with this game — and it shows. The hope is that The Drifter, as a powerful example of what the engine can do, may spawn a whole new batch of adventure games like it. And I wouldn't mind that one bit.

In The Drifter, you wake up in the grime as Mick Carter, a man whose life has seen better days. He's returning home for his mom's funeral, dreading inevitably running into the ex-wife he clearly didn't part with on good terms. His journey starts in a low place and only manages to descend as the game goes on.

Within the game's opening hour, Mick sees a man murdered, his phone loses battery just as he's about to call his sister for help after falling off train tracks, and he winds up tossed into a river with cement shoes after witnessing armed guards abducting a woman.

You'd think that's all she wrote for Mick Carter. But for some inexplicable reason, Mick's pain isn't licensed to end there. Death is never the end for Mick — because he's able to travel back in time, to moments before his death, to try and find another way forward.

So he does. Only to end up in more trouble. Then loop to his death throes once again. Then keep moving. Again and again it goes. Because what else is there to do but to keep pushing forward?

Mick's confusing new "power" isn't all that worries him, though, as he finds himself wrapped up in some deeper conspiracy, seemingly provoked by the same people who left him for dead.

The police chase after him. Those armed guards chase after him. People and things that appear and really shouldn't be there chase after him.

On the run, afraid, and dealing with all the issues that come with returning to your hometown after something horrible happened there, Mick's story is one of constant tension. And the world he inhabits is gritty, grimy, and full of bleak situations that ask him to make impossible decisions.

The best way to describe the tone of this narrative is to imagine John Carpenter directing an adaptation of a grounded Stephen King thriller novel (instead of the 1983 car horror flick Christine). With the synthy score, brilliant use of camera framing in some of its scenes, and a man stalked by horrors both in his mind and hiding in the shadows, The Drifter incredibly captures the pulpy energy of the era when both Carpenter and King were on top of their game.

You might not die, but you'll sweat

If I had one word to describe The Drifter's take on the classic point and click adventure, it'd be: dynamic. Between how Powerhoof approaches puzzle design and how they make the genre that smidgen more accessible for modern audiences, The Drifter offers a more active and responsive kind of adventure game.

It starts with how they approach the pacing of the story, with nearly every one of the game's nine chapters holding a segment powered by an incoming and ever-present threat. A killer bearing down on you, your strained lungs gasping for air as you struggle to find a way out of the bay, a poison swimming through your system. With Mick's death-defying feats, Powerhoof isn't afraid to put you in life-and-death scenarios, looping you through them until you figure out exactly what you need to do to persevere.

It's not quite the constant death of classic Sierra games, and your way through is never that complicated to uncover. But it constantly keeps you on edge, and the mere presence of these threats causes your brain to repeatedly overload with stress. In a genre more defined by the quiet, slow, thinky moments, Powerhoof injected some adrenaline to create one of the most bloodpumping point and clicks I've ever played.

To keep up with these dynamic segments, The Drifter offers a variety of ways to play. There's the traditional point and click setup, where your mouse does everything from movement around the scene to interacting with the environment. It's streamlined, though, with no verbs to worry about and inventories hidden just off-screen.

Then there's the controller play, which offers one of my favorite adaptations of the genre into couch play that I've ever seen. Mick moves around with the left stick, and at any point you can tilt the right stick to highlight all the interactive objects in a radius around him. This ring of interaction updates in real time as he moves around, making pixel-hunting a nonissue and making it clear what you can and can't interact with in the scene.

There are pros and cons to both forms of play. When the tension is high and quick-moving action is needed, PC is preferred, for example — but I found it seamless to hop between my PC and Steam Deck while playing The Drifter for review, and I can't say that for many point and click adventure games.

I'd almost recommend controller play for newcomers to the genre, simply for how easy it is to adapt to it.

The Drifter offers a more active and responsive kind of adventure game.

Having been born and tested in the absurdity of Sierra and Lucasarts point and clicks, I sometimes wonder if my internal difficulty meter is skewed. But I feel fairly confident in saying The Drifter feels approachable on the whole, thanks to its more straightforward puzzles and cinematic pace of play. The biggest complications weren't so much about understanding what the game wanted from me as they were about pushing past its moments of tension. I did take issue with the crafting/inventory combining system, however, which I still wasn't understanding how to do near the middle of the game — both because it was so rarely employed and was not explained well across control schemes.

Setting the scene

From the top-notch voicework to the high-quality pixel art and animation, Powerhoof brings the world of The Drifter to life beautifully with a great deal of polish to its presentation.

It starts with Adrian Vaughan's tour de force performance as Mick. As Mick narrates the horrors he endures in novel-like fashion, his pained, panicked declarations perfectly infuse the the appropriate tinge of desperation you'd expect of a man slowly losing his mind. It's immediately impressive, and I dare anyone to play through the opening chapter and not be reeled in by his performance.

Each new actor brings the world to life in exciting new ways. Whether it's the "boss"-slinging Shogo Miyakita as Detective Hara, or Mick's surprisingly commanding and easily charming sister Annie Galanis, performed by Rhiannon Moushall, these performances fill out the world and meet the standard set by Adrian at the top. Sound design on the whole elevates the experience to another level, adding a radio drama-like quality to The Drifter. Through narration and excellent foley work, each action you take feels even more grounded and weighty.

Compelling, tension-filled [with] a cinematic presentation style.

Then you look at the game and witness the beauty of Barney's pixel work. Powerhoof has incredible pedigree in that regard: their stunning earlier work Crawl still has some of the smoothest pixel animation work I've seen all these years later, and the upcoming Acid Knife showcases how much his art style and animation quality has improved since.

The way light spills into a train car in The Drifter's opening signals how much the team leans into its pulpy thriller vibes. Their use of light, negative space, and depth, as exemplified by the excellent framing of certain scenes — the graveyard scene above, with the crowd's umbrellas creating the edges of the player's view, is a personal favorite — just stacks on top of every other decision to make The Drifter a special piece of art.

The Drifter is part of a class of modern classics for point and clicks, joining 2025's other great adventure game, Old Skies, in both honoring and advancing the genre. With a compelling, tension-filled narrative and a cinematic presentation style, it becomes one of my easiest recommendations — not only as one of the best games this year but as an all-time point and click must-play.

Video Games Are Good and The Drifter is . . . GREAT. (9/10)

+ tension-driven narrative, accessible and approachable point and click gameplay, cinematic presentation anchored by incredible voice work

- straightforward puzzles and narrative won't be what many point and click fans want, death can lose its punch over time, some systems not explained perfectly

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