Journey of a Roach (PC)
Back in the summer of 2011, I joined Steam so that I could play the newly free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2. Like many others though, as soon as I entered that PC gaming ecosystem, I soon found my gaming library swelling as I scooped up title after title during steep discounts and frequent sales. However, despite often checking the games that had been reduced to the lowest prices, there was one game I kept skipping over. Sometimes going for less than a dollar, Journey of a Roach became a recognizable face in the sale section, and while it looked somewhat interesting, for some reason I never took the plunge. Over seven years after its original release in 2013 though, Journey of a Roach finally ended up in my hands… through Blacknut’s streaming service, meaning I still never bought it on Steam. However, after so many years of never committing to grabbing it, it seems I actually was missing out on something rather interesting.
Journey of a Roach takes place in a world after humankind has seemingly wiped itself out with nuclear war. The surface of the planet is a wasteland, but underneath the ground a thriving society of human-sized bugs have eked out a living using what they salvaged from our society. Two roaches live in the subterranean complex these mutated creatures call home, a smaller green-eyed bug being the game’s playable lead and his taller blue-eyed buddy being an accident-prone companion with a more understandably trepidatious worldview than his adventurous friend. The green-eyed roach happens to come across the first sign of new life on the surface while scavenging one day, but before he can show his friend the flower sprouting out of the soil, the blue-eyed bug stumbles down deep into the underground world and ends up caught up in the affairs of the gas mask wearing ants and their unusual experiments. Saving your friend becomes the driving force of this adventure, with the player solving puzzles and interacting with other underground insects to make their way deeper down to find out what the ants are up to.
Despite being a point-and-click adventure with all the inventory puzzle roadblocks you’d expect of the genre, Journey of a Roach avoids the other common staple of their design: the emphasis on writing. Whether it be funny dialogue or intricate story-telling, the point-and-click’s propensity for being a way to experience an interesting story isn’t the main draw here, as the denizens of the underground bunker turned insect society can’t actually speak in words. They’ll make noises at each other that mean something to them, but the player is only able to perceive their meaning through speech bubbles that contain illustrations of what is being discussed. Some can be a little hard to figure out which can be an issue since the game’s hints at puzzle solutions or how items will be used are often in the form of the green-eyed roach making an observation illustrated through this method, but for the most part the game has a pretty good handle of how to use it to both express character emotions, demonstrate how something works, or wordlessly give you the basics of some character’s storyline. A wasp recounts his failed attempt to rise up against the ants, a firefly fauns over the nightclub singer with a lightbulb in her hair, and a motherly spider takes care of flies like they were pets in a world that can convey character pretty decently through design and these visual speech bubbles. While we won’t get the narrative depth or memorable personalities we might have got if they were able to speak English, the characters are still memorable and integrate into the game world well both as people you interact with and parts of the often intricate puzzle solving segments.
To make up for not having its writing be the main draw, Journey of a Roach instead focuses heavily on its puzzle solving component to carry the day. The adventure is divided into a few open areas where you can travel about to find items, speak with other bugs, and figure out how things fit together across the self-contained area. Even with the options limited to the current navigable space though, Journey of a Roach has some surprisingly involved puzzles with multiple steps to achieving your goal. One of the best ways to illustrate this is the portion near the bug night club where some ants are blocking a door deeper into the underground facility and you need to concoct a disguise to make them think you’re one of them. Problem is, the ants are a different color, are wearing gas masks, and have a much larger abdomen then you, so you need to find objects in the area that can serve as costume pieces, perform the right actions to get them from their owners, and alter them so everything looks convincing. Your inventory can get rather packed as you start trying to figure out how your pieces fit into the current puzzles, challenges ranging from trying to figure out how to grant a character’s desires like the diva wanting some music to learning the right sequence of actions to open up more opportunities like learning the lullaby that will put a guard to sleep.
These detailed puzzles definitely have some moments of strange logic, especially when some of the speech bubbles that seem like clues are actually just the roach imagining a humorous outcome rather than something relevant to the actual puzzle. The self-contained nature of the area does mean that you can eventually find the one area where things finally click with some experimentation though, and from there things tend to snowball as roadblocks often pull back to reveal a few new activities to engage with that open up the area’s grander puzzle design. An important aspect of Journey of a Roach’s problem solving is actually how you move about during these segments, as the cockroach character isn’t limited to just walking back and forth on the ground like us humans. Not only can he move around the area in 3D space, but so long as he approaches a wall that isn’t obstructed by something like a pipe or trash, the roach can begin climbing up it and completely twist the world he finds himself in. Climbing across the walls and ceilings as well as on the sides of objects is a vital part of most every major area’s interconnected puzzle. Sometimes it’s to gain access to a vent that can carry you into a new location that was otherwise inaccessible, and other times it gives you a perspective to the action where you can grab an item that would have been out of reach if your feet were locked to the ground. It can be a little disorienting to have the screen rotate so often, but it’s easy to adapt to once you’ve gotten over the initial shock. Instead, the movement’s only lasting issue is the rare moment the game tries to be a little too clever with it, such as one portion where the cockroach needs to maintain his connection to an electrical current and he’s moving through a tight space where it’s easy to accidentally cause the electricity to cut off by touching level geometry.
The different perspective that wall-crawling can provide adds an interesting layer of depth to the exploration of the selection of puzzle hubs, and the game even hides little grubs about for players who skitter off into the corners that weren’t demanding your attention. These are mostly there for collection’s sake though, but the game does concoct some actual hazardous segments for the crawling too like having to time your movement through spinning fans in a vent. The inventory puzzles are definitely the bigger focus though and the thought put into their design continues to shine as new concepts crop up when you push into new areas, the game never forgetting to integrate some interesting applications for your movement options while also bringing in new ideas like a crane you can operate to move objects or a system where you can send power to different areas of the facility. The number of options can be daunting at times and lead to you getting stuck for a bit, but the game also does a good job of never having any pointless objects or interactive points, meaning that you can at least infer that if something is available, it will be relevant eventually, and getting the right tool can soon lead to a wellspring of ideas as the opportunities for puzzle solving suddenly become clear.
THE VERDICT: While it may have a wordless story, Journey of a Roach manages to be an enjoyable point-and-click adventure solely because of its intricate puzzles. The main hubs all do a good job of both limiting your options to things relevant to the current area’s major challenge while still having so many potential interactions that figuring them out requires actually identifying where your inventory, the characters, and environmental objects can work together. It avoids being too obvious with its solutions most of the time and sometimes can be a little obtuse for it, but for the most part, Journey of a Roach does make you feel clever for figuring out its designs that aren’t holding back despite its cute cartoon look and simplistic plot.
And so, I give Journey of a Roach for PC…
A GOOD rating. While crawling on the walls and ceilings could have been enough of a gimmick for some point-and-click developers to sit back and feel like they’ve done enough to diversify their puzzle solving elements, Journey of a Roach builds off of them with an already engaging web of puzzles that keep testing your brain as you work through their many intertwined elements. The small cast of characters and post-apocalyptic world have some appeal despite the game avoiding any written words to tell its tale, but it’s definitely the fully explorable 3D environments that steal the show and the perspective shifting movement options just make these intricate puzzles more detailed and varied. Not every segment of a solution is going to be the best of course, but the satisfying feeling of having a cascade of solutions emerge from one breakthrough moment definitely helps the game remain entertaining even though its roadblocks can sometimes lead to you wandering about in hopes of spotting the one area that will give. Relying purely on the strength of inventory puzzles and basic character interactions means some people will definitely feel the absence of a deeper story or memorable personalities, but there’s still enough character to the world and bug designs that the gameplay has an interesting setting and cast for its backdrop.
Journey of Roach is a game that didn’t deserve to be put off for so long by me. I still can’t tell you to spend anything but the bargain price since it so often hits that level due to frequently being on sale, but if you spot it amidst the crowd of other games going for below a buck on Steam, know that it isn’t there for lack of quality. Perhaps its short playtime or simple story is part of the justification for pricing it so low during the sales, but if you are looking for a point-and-click that can test your problem solving skills without ever getting absurd with its puzzle solutions, Journey of a Roach not only constructs some intricate interconnected ones to work your way through, but it adds that unique wall-crawling angle to the play to make it stand out in a genre which isn’t often known for the strength of its gameplay.