PACIFIC DRIFT

THE DRIFTER is a gorgeous point-and-click with a noir-ish edge

- Shaun Prescott

We meet Mick Carter as a homeless drifter. Due to some unspecified past trauma, he’s abandoned his settled domestic life in a nameless Australian city for a self-flagellating transient existence. He’s en route to home, where he’s been beckoned to attend his mother’s funeral. He does so reluctantly, because it draws him closer to a past he’s deliberately abandoned.

Shit hits the fan almost immediately. Not only is Mick forcibly ejected from his train carriage by a mysterious, possibly supernatural presence, but he’s then framed for the murder of a homeless man in the seedy railway underpass he finds himself in. At first, The Drifter promises to be a dark character study wrapped in a mystery, but it proves to be more – to its detriment.

The Drifter bills itself as a “pulp adventure thriller” and it wastes no time living up to that descriptor. Carter is a depressive but nevertheless oddly calm protagonist, with a familiar Australian matter-offactness about him. He’s downcast, but not entirely ruined. In fact, when a hi-tech conspiracy begins to loom he proves quite resourceful: The Drifter’s point-and-click trappings generally demand MacGyver-like logic, which is to say, an ability to use mundane objects to solve seemingly insurmountable problems.