Point-and-click based adventure investigation type games have become all the rage these days. Telltale has obviously made a killing giving us interesting experiences that in some cases truly blew us away, like in the case of The Walking Dead. However, with this growing popularity for these types of experiences (or more like losing popularity), developers have seen and tried to capitalize on this trend. The Descendant is one of these, and we’ll explore if it does it equally well or not so much.
The Descendant is a multi-season dual-timeline experience which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. Humans have managed to destroy themselves in a man-made extinction event and have saved what remained of our species in ‘arks’ buried deep underground. After many years passed, these humans were defrosted and were sent out to rebuild. The game plays out in two timelines where you are a playable character, one named Mia who is tasked with protecting and overseeing the slumber of the remaining humans while they wait out the nuclear fallout. The other, Donnie, who is set on uncovering why the people in Ark-01 haven’t emerged and will have try and save as many of them.
The game does have a few twists as you go along, which is refreshing. Much like Bioshock in a way, the game lets you go along with a narrative and then throws something in there to make you truly question what is about to happen to not only you but the remaining survivors of Ark-01. Much like Telltale games, The Descendant comes with a truly interesting story, but like the former, it has some issues.
The Descendant like I stated is a point and click adventure type game, which leaves you in a room with little to no expositional cues and expects you to do a list of things before the plot can move forward. Controlling the characters is quite simple enough but sometimes it hampers the experience, thanks to fixed camera angles–the reason Resident Evil sucked a tiny bit–and this makes playing the game regardless of the excellent story quite a task. If I were to be able to ask one small thing, is that the game would have a clear marker as to what you need to actually do and where you need to go, because running around aimlessly while people are dying doesn’t make for a great experience. Even if that is the actual plot.
Graphically the game is quite well designed and I haven’t found any issues with it overall. For a small indie developer, they truly did a spectacular job with it overall. Sound wise it was on par, with voice acting done tastefully, and one would be hard-pressed to find any flaws big enough that might give you the clue that it was not done by a studio with a bigger budget.
Beyond that, I truly enjoyed some aspects of The Descendant, and Gaming Corps did an excellent job with the overall package. However, I do rarely enjoy games such as these since they offer little to no actual gameplay which makes me feel that I’m not actually getting my money’s worth in the end. It’s true that game developers have opted for a more story driven experience, but it seems to me that in these types of games, the story aspect takes center stage and the rest becomes an afterthought. More visual cues for story triggers might help alleviate these issues, but in the end the game would have done much better if they opted for a third person ‘camera behind the player’ angle, instead of the gamer having to guess that there might be something behind a case, or even if it’s possible to go there.
The Descendant is a wonderful game, and I laud the developers for their efforts and the time they put into this experience, but if they took away one thing from this game is that these types of games have become a meme of itself and should be the last place to go for a creator when they sit on a script as good as the one found with The Descendant.
Summary
The Descendant is a post-apocalyptic investigative action game that sees you play as two characters, one tasked with protecting the last remnants of humanity, and the other tasked with trying to investigate why the prior character failed after many years passed. The game is divided into seasons, which reveals a deeper look into the great story that lies within the game. Unfortunately, The Descendant does have its faults, with it leaving the player with little to no clues as to what will move the plot forward, requiring many of the hours playing relegated to finding the trigger that will move the story forward.
The Descendant joins a barrage of games in this genre, many of whom fails to deliver on the main premise of the genre and The Descendant is not one of them. I would love to see this game launch on Xbox One and urge the developers to consider such a move. However, right now it’s only available on Steam, and if you have access to a PC and wants a great story driven adventure title, I would recommend this game.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.