If anything, Detective Gallo was probably the most cock I found in a crowdfunded point'n'click adventure and I'm not even sure the italian studio Footprints Games dressed their anthropomorphic rooster in yellow with the intention of emphasizing a reference to a certain Mr. Tracy, when a complex pun would have worked based on him being a private dick anyway. I would have smiled honestly, if he had been a Gaul as well (because to my knowledge besides cock that's the second possible translation for Gallo). It's just that the game itself isn't all that deep and complicated.
An adventure taking place in an area like a decrepit part of Duckburg doesn't necessarily have to be that and I could imagine inspiration was drawn from Sam & Max Hit The Road, judging from the cartoonish presentation that even improves on the simple icon based user interface. It doesn't seem like coincidence Detective Gallo's partner is a cactus, because the case to solve is actually the murder of exotic plants.
As a debut game, it might have been a good idea to restrict the number of locations and characters. On the other hand Detective Gallo starts out as rather straight forward until I hit the wall of having to hunt for tiny hotspots that I could of course have identified earlier by pressing space. With running back and forth to find the right combination of items, the decently dubbed humor wasn't enough to pick up the game between my first session in April and early July 2023, when I finally wanted to get Detective Gallo off my list.
Luckily, the adventure expands with some relatively surprising plot twists, but even though items usually don't end up as red herrings, the linearity is partly annoying. The designers had a path in their minds for Detective Gallo, so sometimes other actions are required to finalize a thought I had before. This usually leads to getting lost on parts of a puzzle that just isn't next in the queue or that seems self-explanatory, but the realization makes it kinda work counterintuitively.
I ended up looking for hints on the internet for some of them, because I didn't feel like running circles until I accidentally fit the pieces together. It would have helped to keep up contact with the informant for this, but he sadly ignores the private eye's calls later. Instead a limited variety of one liners complement the denial of combinations, making Detective Gallo feel underdeveloped in a world where OG designers make their games more user-friendly these days.
It's sad that compared to another italian genre title, The Wardrobe, Footprints Games tried to establish a more original creation sans all the pop cultural references, but their fellow competitors CINIC Games understood to design the more pleasing product. Whilst the plot is fairly adequate for a cartoon story, Detective Gallo seems to overstay its welcome a wee bit by trying to implement too many puzzles for its narrative limitations of the environment and especially shortage of acting roles.
The almost anticlimactic ending, despite occurring quite rapidly, actually satisfies as a welcome exit, because it fulfills the foreshadowed incompetence of our grumpy investigator in a surprise twist. The humor of Detective Gallo is neither deranged nor overly clever, but would simply work much better in smoother condensing.
It's an interactive sordid Saturday morning cartoon drawn and animated on a gorgeous level, which raised my interest in the first place. I can't say if my expectations are too high for a debut like Detective Gallo, because a lot of things have been done right. But as too often in this day and age what is presented as a final product to me feels more like what should have been a pitch to raise funds for completion.
What's missing maybe was a little more time and money to refine the ideas or, another issue with small teams of independent programmers, the ability to kill darlings. An executive would have had to keep track during a test phase and balance out Detective Gallo much more to the extent of what is an equivalent to a cartoon show episode than the feature film they were trying to cobble together.
Under the maxim of less is more this could have very well functioned as a pilot to a series or maybe even a shorter standalone release shining brighter without its ballast. Assuming nothing was lost in translation from the italian original this I feel would be what I had preferred as a backer as well, looking for a bang for the buck not in playing time alone.
Of course it could have been much worse. I remember Encodya wasting a lot of potential by referencing tropes to a painful degree without reflection. But then there's also Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure, that sure still ain't perfect, but gets plenty of things very right as a crowdfunded debut. It sure plays a role the latter operates at a higher scale of content and Detective Gallo still is kind of promising for future releases, but it's also the game they sent out to their backers and us regular customers spend their well earned money on as well.
It's hard to criticize, when today's big players ship barely more than demos if a physical copy is made available at all and all you get on day one is a beta version to be hopefully patched after the early birds assisted in a testing phase like they purchased green bananas.
Unlike that, independent studios usually are not looking to sell additional content via a game as their shopping platform and so there's often hardly any update unless heavy glitches cause the program's crash. I've read this has been the case during Detective Gallo's finale for some players, but with the version 1.21 installed, I can't confirm any of that, so kudos for providing a working game, I guess?
It's because of these structures I tend to acquire a huge amount of my software via sales to get the most refined game in return and whilst this is a monetary no-brainer, I'd prefer the publishers putting in more effort to satisfy us for full price to make smaller productions like this lucrative. It's a give and take that in my world feels as unbalanced as the creative direction in Detective Gallo.
There's too much "if", not enough that exceeds being just potential which simply doesn't cover the requirements of an independent game anymore, when there are so many studios trying to get a foot on the ground with exactly that as a business model. We can't just accept flaws on a regular basis to give newcomers a chance, when almost everybody is trying and there's no board of trustees to sift through the sheer amount of possibilities.
Please get me right, Detective Gallo is enjoyable on average, but I would like to see the team compete with the legends on an elaborated level and not just give away hints that they might be able to do that. It's great to see more potential is there to keep point'n'click adventures one of my favorite genres, but who's winning when Detective Gallo ends up being the introduction for young gamers, when for instance Broken Age would be a much better amalgamation of old and new?
Facing the truth, Detective Gallo ain't more than just another one of those games to consume because you can't get enough of its type and you hope for a hidden gem. It comes the day you might spend a few hours with this mildly entertaining hardboiled detective story, but I don't see anyone dissecting each and every detail for analysis. You play it, delete it from your hard drive and probably forget about it. The way Detective Gallo is cocky is that the graphic presentation is a lot better than the actual substance.
An adventure taking place in an area like a decrepit part of Duckburg doesn't necessarily have to be that and I could imagine inspiration was drawn from Sam & Max Hit The Road, judging from the cartoonish presentation that even improves on the simple icon based user interface. It doesn't seem like coincidence Detective Gallo's partner is a cactus, because the case to solve is actually the murder of exotic plants.
As a debut game, it might have been a good idea to restrict the number of locations and characters. On the other hand Detective Gallo starts out as rather straight forward until I hit the wall of having to hunt for tiny hotspots that I could of course have identified earlier by pressing space. With running back and forth to find the right combination of items, the decently dubbed humor wasn't enough to pick up the game between my first session in April and early July 2023, when I finally wanted to get Detective Gallo off my list.
Luckily, the adventure expands with some relatively surprising plot twists, but even though items usually don't end up as red herrings, the linearity is partly annoying. The designers had a path in their minds for Detective Gallo, so sometimes other actions are required to finalize a thought I had before. This usually leads to getting lost on parts of a puzzle that just isn't next in the queue or that seems self-explanatory, but the realization makes it kinda work counterintuitively.
I ended up looking for hints on the internet for some of them, because I didn't feel like running circles until I accidentally fit the pieces together. It would have helped to keep up contact with the informant for this, but he sadly ignores the private eye's calls later. Instead a limited variety of one liners complement the denial of combinations, making Detective Gallo feel underdeveloped in a world where OG designers make their games more user-friendly these days.
It's sad that compared to another italian genre title, The Wardrobe, Footprints Games tried to establish a more original creation sans all the pop cultural references, but their fellow competitors CINIC Games understood to design the more pleasing product. Whilst the plot is fairly adequate for a cartoon story, Detective Gallo seems to overstay its welcome a wee bit by trying to implement too many puzzles for its narrative limitations of the environment and especially shortage of acting roles.
The almost anticlimactic ending, despite occurring quite rapidly, actually satisfies as a welcome exit, because it fulfills the foreshadowed incompetence of our grumpy investigator in a surprise twist. The humor of Detective Gallo is neither deranged nor overly clever, but would simply work much better in smoother condensing.
It's an interactive sordid Saturday morning cartoon drawn and animated on a gorgeous level, which raised my interest in the first place. I can't say if my expectations are too high for a debut like Detective Gallo, because a lot of things have been done right. But as too often in this day and age what is presented as a final product to me feels more like what should have been a pitch to raise funds for completion.
What's missing maybe was a little more time and money to refine the ideas or, another issue with small teams of independent programmers, the ability to kill darlings. An executive would have had to keep track during a test phase and balance out Detective Gallo much more to the extent of what is an equivalent to a cartoon show episode than the feature film they were trying to cobble together.
Under the maxim of less is more this could have very well functioned as a pilot to a series or maybe even a shorter standalone release shining brighter without its ballast. Assuming nothing was lost in translation from the italian original this I feel would be what I had preferred as a backer as well, looking for a bang for the buck not in playing time alone.
Of course it could have been much worse. I remember Encodya wasting a lot of potential by referencing tropes to a painful degree without reflection. But then there's also Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure, that sure still ain't perfect, but gets plenty of things very right as a crowdfunded debut. It sure plays a role the latter operates at a higher scale of content and Detective Gallo still is kind of promising for future releases, but it's also the game they sent out to their backers and us regular customers spend their well earned money on as well.
It's hard to criticize, when today's big players ship barely more than demos if a physical copy is made available at all and all you get on day one is a beta version to be hopefully patched after the early birds assisted in a testing phase like they purchased green bananas.
Unlike that, independent studios usually are not looking to sell additional content via a game as their shopping platform and so there's often hardly any update unless heavy glitches cause the program's crash. I've read this has been the case during Detective Gallo's finale for some players, but with the version 1.21 installed, I can't confirm any of that, so kudos for providing a working game, I guess?
It's because of these structures I tend to acquire a huge amount of my software via sales to get the most refined game in return and whilst this is a monetary no-brainer, I'd prefer the publishers putting in more effort to satisfy us for full price to make smaller productions like this lucrative. It's a give and take that in my world feels as unbalanced as the creative direction in Detective Gallo.
There's too much "if", not enough that exceeds being just potential which simply doesn't cover the requirements of an independent game anymore, when there are so many studios trying to get a foot on the ground with exactly that as a business model. We can't just accept flaws on a regular basis to give newcomers a chance, when almost everybody is trying and there's no board of trustees to sift through the sheer amount of possibilities.
Please get me right, Detective Gallo is enjoyable on average, but I would like to see the team compete with the legends on an elaborated level and not just give away hints that they might be able to do that. It's great to see more potential is there to keep point'n'click adventures one of my favorite genres, but who's winning when Detective Gallo ends up being the introduction for young gamers, when for instance Broken Age would be a much better amalgamation of old and new?
Facing the truth, Detective Gallo ain't more than just another one of those games to consume because you can't get enough of its type and you hope for a hidden gem. It comes the day you might spend a few hours with this mildly entertaining hardboiled detective story, but I don't see anyone dissecting each and every detail for analysis. You play it, delete it from your hard drive and probably forget about it. The way Detective Gallo is cocky is that the graphic presentation is a lot better than the actual substance.