What first stands out about Inspector Waffles: Early Days is just how cute the idea is. Inspector Waffles is a PC detective game from 2021. While Inspector Waffles also has a retro visual design, it’s more akin to early flash games on the PC in the early aughts. I imagine that Inspector Waffles does some technical stuff not practical on older technology, ala Shovel Knight, but I digress. Inspector Waffles: Early Days is intriguing because in the same way Inspector Waffles imagines old flash games on personal computers, Inspector Waffles: Early Days imagines what the first game in the Inspector Waffles series might have looked like before flash- which is to say, it would probably have been a Game Boy game.
And indeed, Inspector Waffles: Early Days is indeed, quite literally, a Game Boy game. Broke Studio was kind enough to send me a review copy in a classic Game Boy box with a cardboard insert, a modest instruction manual, and a banana yellow Game Boy cartridge. While Inspector Waffles: Early Days does have color palettes, the shape of the cartridge leads me to believe it would also play on an original green screen Game Boy.
What makes Inspector Waffles: Early Days an especially appropriate facsimile of a retro game isn’t just the packaging, of course. Game Boy games weren’t exactly famous for being text intensive, and what few games did try to read as longer stories didn’t generally make it out of Japan. But playing Inspector Waffles: Early Days is a bit like peering into an alternate universe where developers experimented more with the adventure game format on handhelds back in the nineties.
By and large, the experiment is a successful one. What really helps, of course, is just appreciating that battery powered gaming requires generous saving features. The titular Inspector Waffles can save the game at almost any time by just talking to his partner, Inspector Pancakes, which renders the game quite playable on real hardware. But the whole structure of Inspector Waffles: Early Days is also well-designed around pick up and play gaming. Adventure games can sometimes be obtuse about the clues required for progression, and Inspector Waffles: Early Days benefits from the breaks.
Not that the cases are too difficult mind you. The first case is fairly simple. I got a bit sidetracked by the second case because I misinterpreted extra content as being necessary to the mystery. The third case requires going into the item menu, which isn’t difficult, although it did take me a minute to realize that was something I could even do. The minimalist architecture of the Game Boy actually proves quite appropriate for the adventure genre here. Since there are only so many places you can go, it’s hard to get lost.
Quick cartridge load times are also a huge relief, and don’t punish the player for misclicks or just wild random guessing. So even when progression does get to be a little obtuse, it’s still easy enough to power through. Of course, the flip side of all this speed is that Inspector Waffles: Early Days is a fairly short. The game can be completed in just an hour, although I won’t pretend that I’m anywhere near good enough at adventure games to have finished it that quickly.
The digital release of Inspector Waffles: Early Days runs for ten dollars, and it’s certainly worth that price. The cartridge version is a bit pricier- fifty euros. But honestly? I feel like it’s worth that much too. Because you have to remember, what it was actually like buying Game Boy games back in the day was…they really did cost that much, even if far too many of them were borderline unplayable licensed garbage versions of high value brands. Inspector Waffles: Early Days is, by contrast, entirely cognizant of its own limitations. And it’s the better game for that.
The post A Review of Inspector Waffles: Early Days appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
