The Drifter Is a Gripping Mystery with Grating Characters

By Maddy Myers | July 17, 2025 | 10:00am

Video Games Reviews the drifter

The Drifter Is a Gripping Mystery with Grating Characters

Is Mick Carter, protagonist of The Drifter, supposed to be likeable? I finished all nine chapters of the point-and-click mystery adventure over the course of 10 hours, and I’m still not sure. I sure do know that I don’t like him, and that I also had my complaints with several of the game’s other thinly drawn, archetype-based characters—even though I loved the story unfolding around them.

The mystery at the heart of The Drifter kept me in its grip for the game’s entire runtime. It’s well-told and well-paced, aside from the last chapter, which felt a bit rushed. The Drifter’s writers tie up every loose end in a pretty tight bow, for better or worse, and that’s no small feat given how many loose ends unravel over the course of the game’s science-fiction time travel story.

The Drifter starts with protagonist Mick Carter train-hopping on his way to his mother’s funeral. He shares a train car with a fellow drifter who, after an unprovoked altercation, ominously tells Mick he just can’t seem to stay dead. By the end of the game’s first chapter, Mick has been cursed with this same fate: like any good video game protagonist, he comes back to life every time he dies, but he actually remembers it all and is understandably fucked up over the implications. Mick starts speculating that amoral scientists have been experimenting on unhoused people and drifters like himself in order to test this new sci-fi ability, but over the course of trying to prove out his theory, he gets framed for multiple murders and starts actively hallucinating (an apparent side effect of his new inability to die). Mick somehow manages to enlist a handful of other characters to help him solve the mystery of what happened to him: a young female journalist who’s been looking into an epidemic of missing unhoused people, his dismissive psychiatrist sister, and his ex-wife, who hates him (for abandoning her after the death of their teenaged son a few years prior) and yet still clearly carries a torch for him despite it all.

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There’s a high level of craft on display in The Drifter, especially considering its small team. It has gorgeous pixel art that’s complemented perfectly by a moody, synth-forward soundtrack; the dead bodies start to stack up very early on in this mystery, but because of the stylized visuals, The Drifter never verges into full-on horror. Stacks of corpses, ghostly hallucinations, and monstrous sci-fi abominations don’t ever look that scary when they’re so pixelated, and the strong story at the center of The Drifter ensured I felt just the right amount of creeped out. The Drifter is also fully voice-acted, with nary a bad performance in the bunch; Adrian Vaughn’s work as Mick truly elevates scenes that would otherwise fall flat.

The Drifter

My few specific problems with the point-and-click puzzle design will be doubtless solved upon the game’s full release, but I’ll explain what happened just in case they’re not. I beat The Drifter in 10 hours, but to be honest, I should have done it in six, if not for a specific setting that wasn’t yet complete in the review build I played. There’s an accessibility mode that gives the player the option to highlight all clickable objects, but unfortunately, only the first chapter had been completed in the build I played. This meant that, from time to time, I ended up getting hopelessly stuck on a puzzle and had to resort to the classic “solution” of slowly swirling my mouse across every single inch of the screen, clicking on as many pixels as possible until I found whatever object I had somehow missed. I only had to resort to this a few times, but every time I did, it sucked. When you play this game, dear reader, turn on that accessibility setting and use it liberally; it should probably be the default in the game, especially because the pixelated art style makes it harder than it otherwise would be to tell what’s interactable.

There were also a couple of puzzle-solving sequences—specifically, Chapter 4—that were not necessarily hard so much as tedious. In the fourth chapter, Mick has to navigate between several different locations downtown, talking to different people at each one, presenting each of them with different clues. It just wasn’t always obvious which character might be capable of weighing in on each clue, so I ended up circling Mick around to every single character every single time I collected any new piece of information, just to try to figure out which of them would help me. Oddly enough, Chapter 7 has a similar structure (Mick explores multiple floors of a large building, with different characters on each floor, each of whom can interact with different clues), but stronger writing in that chapter made it a lot easier for me to figure out what Mick should do with each clue. My only problem in that chapter was not realizing I needed to give a character a food ticket for a bowl of soup instead of a bowl of soup, which is going to sound like a non sequitur but which I’m just going to include here because I want to save other people from spending 20 minutes of their damn life trying to figure out how to proceed with that quandary.

All this to say, for a point-and-click mystery adventure, The Drifter is shockingly well-designed in terms of guiding the player towards the next step and allowing them to feel like they’re the ones solving the mystery (as opposed to simply clicking through a series of conveniently placed clues). The problem, as I said at the outset of this review, is not the mystery writing but the character writing.

Several of the game’s characters are flat archetypes that are elevated by great voice acting performances but can’t ultimately escape from being predictable and, at times, insulting. The female journalist character is the worst of the bunch; she’s a classic sexist trope of the over-achieving girl reporter who is willing to do anything for a story, no matter how immoral, while also sensationalizing any and all details in the interest of her own personal career gains above all else. Yet she’s also extremely gullible, a very poor quality for a journalist to have. When Mick first meets her, he makes fun of her to her face repeatedly for being so superficial and bad at her job, and it’s clear we’re meant to agree with him and see her as an annoying brat—which, of course, she is! He’s correct. To see a game presenting such a tired, ancient trope with no attempt to subvert it is particularly depressing in a time period when trust in journalism as an institution is cratering worldwide (including in Australia, where The Drifter’s developer Powerhoof is based) and when women remain minorities in the field (meanwhile, in media depictions of journalism, they’re often portrayed as less ethical than male journalists).

The game’s other female characters don’t fare much better. Mick’s psychiatrist sister is portrayed as caring so much about her career that she literally forgets her husband and children exist; it’s unclear whether this is intended to be comedic or horrifying (you know how career women are, I guess). Just like the female journalist character, she’s brain-shatteringly gullible and incapable of noticing obvious red flags in various situations, even though she and the journalist both do research for a living. Last but not least, there’s Mick’s long-suffering ex-wife, who inexplicably helps him throughout the game. She seems the most like a human being of the female characters, and yet because of that, I couldn’t abide by the writers’ obvious desire for the two characters to reunite romantically. I was rooting for her to escape Mick and the rest of this game, which kept punishing her instead.

The male characters aren’t exactly deep, either, but most of them have a bit more going on internally, with some seeming to be one archetype and then turning out to be another. There is one notable exception. At one point, Mick meets a Japanese-Australian man and, via inner monologue, Mick describes the man’s appearance as Japanese. Once it became clear that this wasn’t supposed to be a reveal that Mick had also gained psychic powers, I wondered if perhaps this character was intended to be an homage to Kim Kitsuragi from Disco Elysium (both characters are detectives who wear orange-yellow jackets with the collars popped up). Either way, the character in question is so under-written that any intent at an homage is lost; his entire personality is calling Mick “boss” as a term of endearment, and by the end of the game, he had said the word “boss” so many times that I never wanted to talk to him again. And so, in the end, Mick comes off like a dick who assumes people’s backgrounds solely based on looking at them, and at no point in The Drifter is it ever made clear if he’s even correct in his assumption.

Despite my irritations with flat writing and stereotypes in The Drifter, I was deeply impressed by its puzzle design, look, and deliciously eerie atmosphere. That’s why I’m disappointed I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly, because there’s a lot in here that’s truly special. But for a group of designers who claim to be heavily influenced by Stephen King, The Drifter is surprisingly superficial when it comes to the core traits of its ensemble cast. King doesn’t always manage to avoid stereotypes himself, but his best works are celebrated for including fully-realized characters who don’t fall neatly into expected roles. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what the creators of The Drifter do next; I imagine that, much like Stephen King, they’ll continue to grow and make even more creative games in the future. But until then, I’ll be wishing that The Drifter had gotten just one more draft.

The Drifter was developed and published by Powerhoof. It’s available for PC.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.