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Inspector Waffles
f there’s one thing I like more
than strong milk,” the titular cat
detective says at the start of his
game, “it’s solving mysteries.” A noir
murder mystery with its tongue
planted firmly in its cheek, Inspector Waffles is
the work-in-progress of Yann at Goloso Games
in France. It contains most of the elements
you’d expect from a Chandler-esque thriller: a
wealthy industrialist
has been murdered
in mysterious
circumstances,
there are numerous
suspects with secrets
to hide, and there are hints of a connection to
a Trumpian billionaire named Maples, whose
looming skyscraper dominates the game’s
early scenes.
Inspector Waffles takes all this and filters it
through a point-and-click adventure populated
by pixel cats and dogs and laced with gentle
humour. Waffles, the scruffy, milk-addicted
detective, has a curious mother fixation which
results in some amusing phone calls – she also
provides a clue or two if you get stuck – while
background details are filled with puns: paintings
by Meowgritte, a classic novel named The
Great Catsby.Yann has clearly enjoyed crafting this pet-noir
world, and game design is, he tells us, something
of a release from his day job as a software
engineer. “I started making games six years
ago because I was bored at work,” he says. “I’d
been working on a project for six months in a
big company, and then, for a stupid reason, the
project was cancelled, and all of my work came
to nothing. I wanted to make sense of the code
I’d developed, and I
love video games, so I
gave it a try and haven’t
stopped since.”
The creative spark
that led to Inspector
Waffles began at a game jam three years ago,
where the theme was, Yann says, “cats and
dogs” (“Without the game jam, I’d probably have
never done a game with animals, to be honest,”
he confides). Inspired by the point-and-click
adventures he played growing up – among them,
Broken Sword and Indiana Jones and the Fate of
Atlantis – Yann began thinking about the kind
of story he could tell within these parameters.
“I thought, ‘I could do a point-and-click game,
with detective game mechanics. It would be fun
to have a case with a cat who fell from a window
and died, because they’re supposed to fall on
their paws.’ That’s how Inspector Waffles started.”“
IMeet the French developer behind a distinctly
hairy point-and-click murder mystery“I started making games
six years ago because
I was bored at work” Inspector Waffles is built in
Unity, but with some custom
tools Yann has made to
manage and import dialogue.