HECTOR: Ep3 – Beyond Reasonable Doom Review

Well okay then. Less than a minute into Hector: Ep3 - Beyond Reasonable Doom and Hector's already stuck inside a septic tank deathtrap. Color me impressed. From there, it's a race against logic as the crude P.I. attempts to break free, put together the final pieces of the three-episode long puzzle and save what might very well be the worst town in the entire United Kingdom. There will be puzzles. There will be humor. And most of all, there will be badgers.

Hector: Ep3 is every bit the same style of adventure game series veterans have become accustomed to. There's tapping, item gathering, item usage, insane characters and some very, very crude (and hilarious) jokes. It's also every bit the same style of adventure game Telltale fans are used to. Which is to say it's a quality experience with excellent writing that will satisfy any point-and-clicker's urge to use weird items to solve weirder problems in a manner that just wouldn't make sense in the real world.

Newcomers might be a bit lost when certain characters make a return or are revealed to be the evil mastermind behind the whole evil scheme, but Telltale does an admirable job of filling in most of the blanks with a number of dialogue choices. It's still best to play through the first two games before tackling this filthy finale, but it is possible to come in blind and still enjoy the story and the characters. Likewise, the mechanics and gameplay work quite well, with touch controls that aren't garbage. It's also great (from an adventure geek standpoint) to not only have a hybrid hint/walkthrough system in place, but to have a blissfully uncluttered inventory. Very few of the items Hector can pick up stay in his pockets for very long, and once they've outgrown their usefulness they're removed for good. No item confusion here.

I was a bit disappointed to find myself resorting to the hint system on a couple of occasions, however. For the most part, Beyond Reasonable Doom's puzzles are figure-out-able, but there were instances when I wasn't sure what to do next because I just didn't know certain items existed. For example, at one point Hector mentions helium tanks. I knew why I needed them and where to use them, but I had zero idea where they were because I'd honestly never noticed them before.

Nagging issues aside, Beyond Reasonable Doom ends the series with a bang. Several of them. Literally. I doubt it will win over point-and-click haters, but my goodness is it a great offering for fans of the genre.