A Golden Wake review: The City Beautiful

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Unlike other tales, Grundislav Games' A Golden Wake is a piece of historical fiction, dipping its toe into a deceptively hopeful economic period following the first World War. Being that the game is deeply-rooted in American history, players also have the luxury of knowing the gist of how the story ends; the market crashes, hurricanes hit the coast and the Great Depression sets in. Even with that knowledge on hand, A Golden Wake remains a delightful trip through the best and worst of times for its cast.

The point-and-click adventure game skips through the era and its protagonist becomes a sympathetic symbol for a rough economic time. It stars Alfie Banks, a smooth-talking New York real estate agent that travels to Florida to cash in on the 1920s land boom. Banks is one fictional character in a very real setting, but A Golden Wake is as much about the Roaring Twenties as it is about the man that's looking to make a name for himself in the business world.

A Golden Wake uses a retro-inspired pixel art design that calls back to Sierra's VGA games, dictating a heavy emphasis on the sense of "place" in the game's inspired version of Miami. Like those games, players move Banks from one static scene to the next, pushing the story along as Banks interacts with historically-inspired characters. It's a narrative-heavy game that uses light puzzle-solving to become slightly more interactive than a visual novel, a good choice for the story's setting.

That place is primarily Coral Gables, the luxurious suburb of Miami dreamed up by George Merrick, a real-life entrepreneur that plays a heavy role in the game. Tall, well-detailed palm trees and ornate brick walls guard lavish real estate offices in one striking scene. Small elements from the arches on buildings to the billboards on the rooftops elicit the "City Beautiful" movement, an era in American history marked by swinging jazz and financial opportunity. It's a period not visited often by video games, and A Golden Wake's artful details provide a great window for players to experience a piece of history, or at least an approximation of it.

The art style is matched by the game's soundtrack, which hops lightly with the sounds of a meandering upright bass tossed in with dancing trumpets. Likewise, the game's voice acting featured great performances from prominent characters with passable ones on the fringe of its cast, the majority of which broaden the tone and liveliness of each scene. In only so many brush strokes and music notes, lone developer Francisco Gonzalez designed a game that feels dedicated to the memory of the Roaring Twenties and its people, which is commendable in its own right.

A Golden Wake mainly follows simple point-and-click game design; Banks scoots from one area of town to the next, talking with curious characters and picking up key inventory items along the way, using those items to solve puzzles that advance the story. Some items are used to gain (or betray) the trust of others in a fetch-quest fashion, such as slipping money to the clerk at a men's club to meet an elected official in favor of prohibition laws. Gonzalez refined the game's approach by including a number of mini-game style scenes that mix up the action as well.

For instance, Banks spends his first day in Miami earning the attention of Merrick by first impressing the sales manager, Doc Dammers, who sold land plots to the public in front of a painted wagon. To win over Dammers, players must sell homes themselves, either in an on-the-spot, one-on-one conversation with a lone buyer or by matching five prospective buyer descriptions and with their ideal homes. It's the first of a variety of events that pulls players away from the traditional adventure game format and introduces a broader variety of puzzles, such as a "find the problem" home inspection game.

Those games, just like the item-based point-and-click puzzles in A Golden Wake, are rather easy to complete. Scenes where Banks must convince another character to make an advantageous decision include a "seller's intuition" system, which tells players what characteristics to look out for in order to select the correct approaches in conversation. Save for the final two conversation scenes, I never thought to use the intuition system once, as the dialogue-based puzzles were fairly straightforward and not particularly difficult to navigate. While the pace of the adventure switches up nicely with the mini-games, they don't offer much that enlightens the story in a significant way.

Banks' four-chapter journey in A Golden Wake begins in late 1921 and concludes in 1935, so the adventure will occasionally feel slightly disjointed when fast-forwarding a few years from one chapter to the next. However, Banks' career motives and outlook on life transition well between the parts of his life, so I never lost a sense of who the character was at heart and how he fit into the environment. I also never stopped sympathizing with Banks, the good-natured man that gets caught up in political, business and even mob affairs. From the very beginning of his tale, the salesman lives to serve others (to his dismay), and even key opportunities for players to make decisions that might impact the story falls in line with that overall theme of powerlessness. Banks discovers firsthand that moving with the times was more attractive than sticking to his principles and getting swept under the waves.

As real-life history shows, Florida's land boom was bound to crash in the mid 1920s, but only the player has the advanced knowledge that a storm is on the horizon. A Golden Wake's place as a period piece alleviates the worry that its ending outweighs Alfie Banks' journey. Rather, Banks ticks like the hand on the face of a clock, carrying players through a beautiful, and in other ways unfortunate moment in history. As a functional video game, the action stutters a little with its mini-games and doesn't offer a very significant challenge to the player. A Golden Wake interprets a rich history in its chapters and paints an image of the best and worst of the 1920s, and while its overly-easy puzzles didn't really add to the story, I felt a stronger appreciation for that era after playing through it.

This review is based on an approved Steam download of A Golden Wake, provided by Wadjet Eye Games. Images: Grundislav Games.

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