Review for The Secret of Retropolis
I have always been a sucker for the film noir premise of a shady, hard-drinking, down-on-his luck, two-bit private detective looking for his next case in order to pay the bills. So I was delighted to assume the role of Philip Log, the protagonist of The Secret of Retropolis, the kind of classic gumshoe you would imagine except for one key difference: he’s a robot in a retro futuristic city of machines. When a gorgeous dame in distress enters Philip’s office one day with a case too good to pass up, the game is afoot with a major villain and plenty of goons, conspiracy and intrigue to contend with. Its VR elements are fairly limited and it’s over far too soon, but you will have a lot of fun interacting with well-developed characters and solving multilevel puzzles while being entertained with humorous anecdotes.
Like any good hard-boiled detective story, this one starts with a slick introduction to Philip, alone against a dark background, smoking a cigar and narrating where things stand. He explains that humans are long gone now, but that before they disappeared they created a civilization of robots in the city of Retropolis and programmed them to serve in all walks of life to forever keep the memory of mankind alive. But the robots, just like the humans before them, have become apathetic and broken, exhibiting traits of loneliness, greed and betrayal. This has led to corruption at the highest levels. Philip started his career as a detective with the RPD, but since he and his partner kept investigating the higher-ups and refused to be intimidated by the resistance they encountered, the latter was murdered when they got too close to the top. That’s when Philip decided to become a private eye, but he still hopes to someday uncover who was behind the death of his partner.
As gameplay begins, at first all you see is an old-fashioned telephone surrounded by shadows, ringing off the hook. You need to physically reach out and grab the handset and hold your controller to your ear to answer, and when the call is finished, the shadows disappear to reveal your humble PI office. It is here that the restrictions of a seated-only VR game become apparent. You can look around but can’t move anywhere in-game, and if you happen to stray too far outside your actual play area, the game scolds you to get back to the action via a re-center button. To explain this limitation, Philip tells you he is so lazy he doesn’t walk anywhere; he just extends his mechanical hands to interact with any object in view, even those far beyond his regular reach. While this admission is clever, it does not mitigate the lack of movement during gameplay, which significantly decreases exploration. However, in a nice touch, there is a mirror in the room where you can see your reflection, realistically showing your every move.
You will quickly warm to Philip. Despite being a robot he smokes, drinks, and likes to listen to vinyl records. You can grab one off his desk and play it on the turntable in the corner to enjoy some jazzy tunes. You’ll examine the contents of your office by simply pointing the light beam from one of your controllers at the objects around you. Usually all you get is a comment, mostly humorous but occasionally informative to the plot or backstory. A cursor change will indicate items you can interact with, such as smashing your piggy bank, and some you can add to your inventory. There is no tutorial to guide you with these game mechanics, but it is pretty intuitive so none is needed.
Soon Philip says he needs a drink to steady himself. You find a flask in your floating briefcase, which appears when you lift your unmade Murphy bed. This reminded me of the walking luggage in the Discworld games, as it follows you around for the entire game, but instead of traveling on multiple legs it floats on anti-gravity pods. When opened, the lid serves as a hint system displaying a message about what you need to do next, in this case to “Drink your problems away.” You take the flask and lift it to your lips physically using your controller, and tilt it to drink.
In your drunken haze, the flask turns into a projector showing a movie of someone coming toward you. This is stylishly done, with just a silhouette of a sexy woman in high heels, walking in the shadows, accompanied by a paraphrased version of one of the most iconic lines in all film noir history: “Of all the offices of all the private investigators in all of Retropolis… she had to walk into mine.” Straight out of Casablanca, it is a perfect introduction to your new client, Jenny Montage, a sultry actress and singer with a problem in need of a private eye.
This is where the game kicks into full swing. Jenny’s Sapphire Nucleus, which is not only the famous gem she always wears in public but also the source of her power, has been stolen. If it is not returned within 24 hours, she will deactivate and lose all her data permanently. Your job is to find and return the gem, but it will not be easy. It has been taken by her abusive husband, Senator Meric, a politically powerful former producer of hit movies who knows how to influence public opinion. You will need to visit various locations and use all your detective skills to solve puzzles and avoid the bad guys and sticky situations to save Jenny in time.
Each area you visit in conducting your investigation is full of atmosphere, including the town’s red-light district, a seedy hotel room, a fancy night club, and finally a desert wasteland. Once you have accomplished your objective in the current scene, you can click on your nearby car to automatically transition to the next preset location. Travel between destinations is accompanied by equally stylish cut scenes, mainly showing Philip driving his vintage hover car through the city airways, past silhouettes of skyscrapers and other flying vehicles. These scene transitions are varied and slick; your car sometimes moves from side to side with heavy traffic in the background, while other times it snakes along accompanied by mellow music and Philip’s smooth narration about where you are heading. It very much reminded me of the Tex Murphy games, with Tex in his speeder providing the appropriate monolog to move the story along.
The art style is striking in that it’s very cartoony, which is unusual for film noir. The graphics are pretty minimalist, with lots of empty space in places, but they contain bold, bright colours and have more than enough detail to make you feel at home in your surroundings. Despite being robots, all of the inhabitants of Retropolis have their own distinct personalities and styles, and the character models generally match their roles nicely. Jenny sports a hairstyle right out of the 1940s, a slim cocktail dress, black thigh-high stockings and high heels, while Philip wears a fedora and is the only one with the ability to extend his hands. Senator Meric wears a tie, and the goons look suitably muscular. While Jenny is full figured and walks on two legs, all others, including Philip, hover on a single antigravity pad at waist level. Smooth animations and cut scenes use the same visual style, accompanied by appropriate lighting, music and sound effects. Jenny is particularly well animated, smoking a cigarette at the end of a holder, waving it around occasionally when she talks.
You will meet a variety of other robots in your investigation. You can speak with some of them, but in most cases the dialog is scripted. For example, when you try to talk to the mechanic in the red-light district, he tells you to scram, and if you steal his cigar he threatens you physically. Besides Jenny, the exceptions to this rule are Senator Meric and a very proper maître d’ at the club, with whom you can have an actual conversation. In these encounters you are presented with a number of dialog choices. The first time this occurs is when you meet Jenny in your office. She asks if you have seen any of her movies, and you can choose Yes or No or to skip that particular dialog, which just gives you an amusing response. Your selection here, as in all subsequent conversations, does not impact the gameplay but it does affect the response you get. In most cases the choices disappear once you have made your selection, except when speaking with the maître d’, with whom you can go through all the options regardless of your choices.
The voice acting is very well done. Jenny is a standout, followed closely by Philip, which is good since both characters have a lot to say. Jenny speaks matter-of-factly when providing background, but with the appropriate emotion when circumstances change. When a police droid bursts into the hotel room unexpectedly, she sounds genuinely terrified. She even sings a song at the club with a beautiful voice, although a different voice actor was used for that part. Philip speaks in more of a monotone style (again just like Tex Murphy) but is roused a few times when Jenny is in danger. Senator Meric is suitably creepy and evil, and the maitre d’ has a bit of a snooty British accent. The other characters don’t talk much but are also well done, such as the mechanic sounding very threatening. Except for Philip, whose voice sounds more human, everyone else has a mechanical tone, which of course makes sense since they are all robots.
The soundtrack is excellent throughout, with lots of piano and sax. Along with the record playing in your office, a nice jazz number is heard at the Blue Screen club when you visit. In other areas, like the red-light district and hotel room, the score is more of a generic, low-key melody that sometimes repeats itself. But there is one scene that is quite tense, in which the music becomes dark and foreboding. Sound effects are used sparingly since there is not a lot of action, but things like breaking glass and the engine of your car sound very realistic. Ambient noise is particularly effective when you end up in a desert wasteland, with the desolate sound of the wind whistling over the sand.
The plot is paper thin but suitably cheesy. Early in the game you need to solve a series of puzzles and find clues to the whereabouts of the missing diamond so you can return it to Jenny. Later, however, Senator Meric shows up and steals both Jenny and the jewel. The rest of the game has you tracking Jenny down and freeing her from her husband’s evil clutches. (To be fair, there are hints of a deeper story, especially regarding the motives of Meric, but they are tenuous at best, and Philip disregards them. This is likely laying the groundwork for the promised sequel, however.)
The puzzles are all well integrated, sufficiently clued, and a lot of fun to solve because of the multiple steps needed to complete them. I particularly enjoyed the clever sequence required to get some goons out of a nightclub. My only complaint is the lack of them, given the limited locations and very short play time. The key to solving them is to carefully examine everything in each location by either highlighting it with your laser pointer (such as a painting on the wall or a picture on a desk) or trying to pick it up or interact with it in some way (such as using the phone or grabbing a broken police drone. (As an aside, if you are an Easter Egg fan, be sure to click on the TV on the wall in the hotel room multiple times until the end!)
The protagonist’s commentary can be very important. In some cases you’ll just get a funny remark, such as in the red-light district, where if you click on the entrance to a club called the Plug & Play, Philip says, “I’m not going in there. I don’t want to catch anything.” But if the item is integral to a puzzle, Philip will provide a clue of some sort, and sometimes more than one if you examine it again. Experienced gamers might consider this too much hand holding, but most puzzles involve multiple steps to solve, such as figuring out how to get Meric’s suitcase from a hotel room behind a window protected by electrified metal bars. And if you need more help, don’t forget that you can always look at your briefcase lid for a reminder of what you need to do next if you are not sure.
There are two very different endings, triggered by a particular late-game dialog choice. While one ending is much darker than the other, both are intriguing in their own right and promise to have serious implications for the promised sequel, so I will be looking to see how such diametrically opposed outcomes are resolved. (Hint: for the “good” ending, be sure to wait past the credits to see what happens.) The whole game can be completed in about an hour (even if you take your time), but you don’t need to replay it to see both, as there is an option to just replay the last scene from the main menu, and I highly recommend that you do. Before that point, an autosave system is activated whenever the scene fades to black, which took me a long time to figure out as there is no icon to let you know your progress has been saved.
Hopefully the upcoming sequel will pick up on the threads of a deeper plot hinted at here and weave them into a more substantial story, as well as better exploiting the potential of virtual reality. And yet despite the limitations of this debut installment, I absolutely loved playing The Secret of Retropolis and I think most adventure gamers will too. The puzzles are challenging and fun to solve, the locations interesting and varied, and the characters are engaging and well rounded. Even if you are not a huge fan of the film noir genre, the developers have nailed the style, music, atmosphere, characters and plot to provide an amusing, entertaining adventure that feels like a cartoonier version of Tex Murphy with robots, and it's not to be missed if you have the required VR hardware.
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