Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol

Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol

released on Dec 31, 1996

Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol

released on Dec 31, 1996

At last, a game starring DEVO, in which the pop group WHIPS IT into shape to save Spudland from a strange space turkey man! Are we not men?! We are adventure games!


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Review #2 - 2023

It's quirky. It's bizarre. It's incomprehensible. It's so unapologetically 90s, an era where the CD-ROM allowed for developers to take advantage of multimedia, and push the medium to its limits with reckless abandon. Videos, music, interactive graphics galore. You could do anything. Literally anything. There were no guidelines to how these things should be made, nor was there very much in the way of quality control. That's how you end up with products like this.

The game has you play as a member of the Smart Patrol (if I gather that correctly). Your job is to... well I actually don't know. You're thrust into this strange Factory Pomo designed world where you have hardly any time to explore it. You visit an area, only to be told you need to get back to your vehicle before the time runs out (I swear you only have 5 minutes to do anything). That's the gameplay really, if you can call it that. In true 90s gaming fashion, you don't have a clue what to do, and it's all down to doing things in a specific, unspecified order so you can progress. It expects you to start the game over, and over, and over again in order to get it right, but any person in their right mind would quit playing the moment it ends.

I'm not any person in their right mind.

I intend on returning to this game, and I intend on figuring this thing out. I'm a sucker for cheese like this. The aesthetic is enough to draw me in, and the scenes I did encounter, had me dying to uncover more. I don't know how involved DEVO was in the making of this game, but regardless, it has their abstract worldview written all over it. I for one, will be back. Everyone else, you'll be better off saving your sanity. Here, watch this guy play it.

I really wish I liked this game. I love Devo, I love inScape's other games, but it's so frustrating. The timer is way too aggressive, leading to you constantly restarting the game, and the puzzles aren't interesting either. There's some fun world design and the music is great of course but that's about it.

I don't think this game is as bad as some people make it look, but it's not great either. It has some fun locations and events, but navigating through the game is unnecessarily annoying.

I'll try to explain. There are 12h of in-game time, each hour you must choose one of the many locations of the game to travel or keep in the location you are currently at. Some events will immediately end the hour, or the hour can simply end by taking too much time exploring. It's nowhere as bad as something like Mizzurna Falls and you can save at the start of every hour and even go back in time while keeping items so getting the good ending shouldn't be hard at all, however the system gets annoying very fast, finding out where you need to be at the right time is pure trial and error and since everything is timed, you never feel fully comfortable to explore.

It's worth to play once if you are into weird 90s point & click, but if you want to see everything that the game has to offer you will need A LOT of patience.