The cel shaded look transforms into hand drawn, comic book animations for Journey of a Roach’s brief cutscenes.
Journey of a Roach is Kobold Games’ first commercially published videogame. It is also their first adventure game. Based in Switzerland, Kobold Games is composed of only five people who work not only on videogames for entertainment, but educational, practical and advertising videogames as well. You’ve got to pay the bills in some way, right?
Journey of a Roach’s central hook is in the title: the protagonist, Jim, is a cockroach which means that there is no legible dialogue in Journey of a Roach, and that the player may traverse not only the floor, but the wall and the ceiling too. It’s no surprise, then, that Daedalic Entertainment stepped in to publish Journey of a Roach given its original hook.
The illegible dialogue is expressed through baby speak and childish vocalisations which manage to simultaneously convey the emotion of the characters vocalising, while also irritating the ear. The music is composed in a similarly juvenile vein, but succeeds in complimenting the childish melodies with enjoyable, off-key twangs and jarring note clashes.
The soundtrack provides the cutesy aesthetic with a slightly offsetting tone that prevents everything from becoming overly saccharine. The world of Journey of a Roach is filled with cute and endearing inhabitants—baby flies are such mellifluous delinquents that even a spinster spider might feel compelled to nurture their sweet little souls.
The plot begins with an accident prone cockroach wandering through a nuclear wasteland and stumbling across a lone flower. Full of excitement, the cockroach clumsily trundles off, beginning a comedy of accidents that eventually result in the beginning of Jim’s journey—to find and rescue the accident prone cockroach. Friendship over flowers.
The illegible intercourses are made legible through thought-bubble style, illustrated translations—however, these translations are not always perfectly clear; though most of the time they do manage to effectively convey the objective of any given puzzle through nothing but a cartoon image and some sweetly stuttered vocalisations.
Squee! The Shakespearian dialogue in action.
The puzzles are affected most directly by the all wandering nature of the cockroach through structure, rather than any salient form of environmental manipulation. But there are a few puzzles that require careful and clever traversal of walls and ceilings to manipulate or explore in new and clever ways or to gain a different perspective on a seemingly barren puzzle scene.
The ability to walk upon ceilings and walls allows for relatively small environments and short, simple puzzles to be elongated and given a sense of grandiosity. Puzzle solutions in the form of scattered items become all the more interesting to find due to the fact that they might be anywhere—even on the ceiling, or just out of sight halfway up a wall.
The keyboard or controller movement also becomes all the more engaging due to this sense of freedom. Unlike in many adventure games that use manual input for movement, there is a tangible feeling to the environment that easily engages the player—rather than making them simply wish that they could get the movement out of the way with the ease of a click.
The puzzles—structured enjoyably and solidly composed—sometimes falter. Due to their general reliance on simple item collection or combination, often they can be solved simply by combining items at random, and when an item is not clearly illustrated, then sometimes the cartoon instructions and directions make random combination the only discernible solution.
Journey of a Roach shares with The Walking Dead not only the same principles of movement, but also a similar graphical tone. Not only are the graphics cartoony, but draw upon the same colour palette of The Walking Dead as well; which is no surprise given the post-apocalyptic setting that manages to—like the music—be simultaneously cute and off-putting.
Journey of a Roach is not merely a videogame that relies on an only half-realised gimmick, but one that uses that gimmick in a somewhat surprising way—to make traversal in an adventure game enjoyable. Journey of a Roach is not merely a cutesy, saccharine story, but one with an amusing take on nuclear apocalypse and a counterintuitive environmental ending.
