Why Be Famous When You Can Be Infamous?
Return to the glory days of role-playing and adventure with this humor-filled fantasy epic, styled in the vein of classic PC RPGs, where you play the charming villain. Blending turn-based combat and spellcasting with puzzle solving and adventure, players can choose from three character classes — brigand (strength), rogue (stealth), or sorcerer (magic), each with unique storylines and adventures — in one of the largest retro role-playing experiences ever. A spiritual heir to yesteryear’s heroic quests, adventurers are invited to explore a world of hand-drawn wonder, as they wind their way through trap-infested dungeons, battle slavering beasts with swords or custom-made spells, and steal entire town’s worth of treasure from unsuspecting townsfolk. Being bad has never felt so good!
Quest for Infamy originally launched on PC back in 2014 with no console versions in sight, so it’s curious that 8 years later that’s what has happened. You’d be forgiven in thinking it was a 90s game with its visuals and gameplay, which is a combination of turn-based battles and a point-and-click adventure with comedy aspects that is reminiscent of the Monkey Island series. It’s a nice throwback to these types of games that are in rare company these days and there’s a decent story thrown in too.
In terms of console controls though, things are a bit mixed. It doesn’t feel like it has been optimised for them, so it’ll take a while to get accustomed to how it works when you select your character to move around to the next screen and to even enter buildings, but combat works in the standard way so there’s nothing to worry about there. Point-and-click games have always had issues on consoles though, so I can’t be too harsh on it.
The visuals are a throwback to 90s nostalgia with pixelated characters, locations and text that takes a while to get used to reading due to the odd font. Voice-acting isn’t too bad here either and the script does have a nice dash of humour to it, while the soundtrack is impressive overall.
The Verdict
Quest for Infamy is a nice nostalgia trip of PC RPG/Point-and-click games and while it doesn’t have the console optimisation that you would hope for in 2022, it’s still a humour-filled journey that will please fans of the genre.