Brok the InvestiGator

Point-and-click adventures have spent two decades in a defensive crouch. The genre’s revival has largely been an exercise in nostalgia management: pixel art, pun-heavy dialogue, inventory puzzles that exist to be solved rather than to mean anything. BROK the InvestiGator, from the French one-person-plus-collaborators indie studio COWCAT, is the rare entry that stops apologizing for the form and starts arguing with it.

The pitch sounds like a fever dream from a 1994 development meeting. You are Brok, an alligator private investigator and washed-up boxer, scraping a living in a “light cyberpunk” future where anthropomorphic animals inherited the Earth and the wealthy sealed themselves under a dome to escape the toxic air outside. Brok is raising Graff, his late wife’s son, and can’t let go of the case that killed her. That’s the noir skeleton. Bolted onto it: side-scrolling beat ‘em up combat, RPG levelling, and a branching narrative with multiple distinct endings. On paper, that’s three games fighting for the same fifteen hours.

In practice, it works because COWCAT found the one structural idea that unifies them. Nearly every obstacle in BROK has at least two solutions — reason it out, or punch through it. Not as a difficulty toggle. As a characterization engine. The game is watching which one you choose, and it remembers.

The market has responded well. BROK holds a 4.8/5 from 106 iOS ratings and a 79 on Metacritic — numbers most adventure games never post. It’s on Steam, Switch, iOS and Android at $19.99, fully voice acted, and it ships with a blind accessibility implementation the rest of the industry has yet to match.

• Dual-Path Problem Solving: Nearly every puzzle has a deductive solution and a violent one. Both work. Both are canon. The game tracks the pattern and forks the story accordingly, feeding into multiple genuinely distinct endings rather than a slider between “good” and “bad.”
• Two Playable Protagonists: Swap between Brok and Graff at will. Brok brawls and intimidates; Graff opens doors Brok’s reputation slams shut. The switch is instant and often mandatory to progress.
• Deduction Board: Collect clues, then combine them manually to form conclusions. No auto-solve when you’ve picked up enough evidence — you have to actually make the connection.
• Landmark Blind Accessibility: Full narration, audio description, and puzzles redesigned to be solvable without sight. Not a screen-reader bolt-on. A parallel design pass.
• Relaxed Mode: Disables all combat, leaving a pure adventure game. A real accommodation, not a joke difficulty.
• Four-Player Local Co-op: Couch co-op in a detective game, because the brawler sections can hold extra hands.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop alternates investigation and violence, and COWCAT is smart enough to know that alternation alone is boring. What holds it together is that the two modes are competing solutions to the same problem, not sequential courses in a meal.

Locked out of an apartment. You can find the super, trade a favor, get the key. Or you can kick the door in. The second option is faster, costs you nothing mechanically in the moment, and quietly moves Brok toward being the kind of alligator who kicks doors in. Later, someone will react to that. A character will close off. An ending will drift out of reach. The game never flashes a “CHOICE MATTERS” banner — a restraint worth admiring — it just files the behavior away.

This is the design’s real achievement, and it’s worth being precise about why it works. Most branching narratives put the fork in a dialogue tree, where the player is consciously roleplaying. BROK puts the fork in the friction layer — the moment you’re stuck and impatient. Your choices reflect who you actually are as a player late on a Tuesday, not who you’ve decided your character should be. That’s a far more interesting instrument.

Where It Sags

Now the honest part. The combat is not good. It’s competent, it’s playable, and it’s a long way from justifying a third of the runtime. Combo variety is thin, enemy behavior is readable quickly, and the RPG progression mostly exists to keep your damage numbers ahead of the encounter tables. Levelling up doesn’t unlock new expression; it unlocks permission. When a boss wall forces you back to grind trash fights, the game briefly becomes exactly the tedious thing it spent hours proving it wasn’t. This is the single most consistent criticism in player reviews, and it’s correct.

The opening drags. BROK takes its time establishing the dome, the class stratification, Brok’s finances, Graff’s resentment, and the shape of the old case. That investment pays off — by the midpoint the story has real weight and genuine cruelty — but the first couple of hours ask for patience that a lot of players will not extend. COWCAT front-loaded the worldbuilding and back-loaded the hook.

Character swapping creates backtracking. Being able to switch between Brok and Graff at will is elegant until a puzzle requires you to walk one of them across three screens to trigger something, then walk the other one back. It’s pacing damage inflicted by a good mechanic, which is the most frustrating kind.

The Accessibility Work

This deserves unambiguous praise, because it gets waved at as a nice-to-have and it is not. Adventure games are among the hardest genres to make blind-accessible — they are built on spatial hunting, on visual pixel relationships, on noticing. COWCAT didn’t add a screen reader and call it a day. Puzzles were adapted. Navigation was rebuilt. Audio description covers scenes that would otherwise be pure visual comedy. The result is the first full-length adventure game a blind player can complete unassisted.

That’s not a feature bullet. That’s a studio of this size doing work that far larger studios have the budget for and haven’t done. The full voice acting — professionally performed across the entire script — is what makes it possible, and it’s a substantial production on its own terms. Every NPC, every throwaway exchange, voiced.

The art direction is hand-drawn 90s Saturday-morning cartoon, and it’s executed with a confidence most retro-styled indies only cosplay. Thick outlines, expressive character animation, a palette that keeps the cyberpunk grime warm rather than the usual teal-and-magenta neon cliché. Brok’s face carries the story — this is a character design that can look tired, which is harder than it sounds.

The dome-versus-outside visual split does real narrative work. Sealed interiors are clean, bright, over-lit. The outside is smog-yellow and cramped. You understand the class politics before anyone explains them.

The UI is the weakest visual element. The deduction board and inventory are functional but plain, and they sit awkwardly against art that’s otherwise bursting with personality. As a 2D sprite game with modest technical demands, it’s light on hardware across the board — including Switch, where 2D games of this scope have little to strain against.

Steam is the definitive version. Mouse-and-keyboard suits the investigation half — precise cursor work for hotspot hunting, fast clue-combining — and a controller handles the brawling better than the mouse does. Switching between them without menus is how this should always work.

Nintendo Switch suits the game’s shape. Handheld mode fits a 15-to-20-hour narrative adventure the way the platform was designed for, and the beat ‘em up sections want a d-pad. Local co-op for up to four is also far more likely to actually happen on a Switch than on a gaming PC.

iOS and Android are the compromise. The point-and-click layer translates cleanly — tapping hotspots is arguably more natural than clicking them. The combat does not. Virtual buttons for a game about timing punches is a known-bad pattern, and BROK doesn’t solve it; it just implements it carefully — a shortcoming players flag consistently. The saving grace is Relaxed Mode, which turns mobile BROK into a pure adventure game and removes the problem entirely. Play it that way.

The mobile release also uses chapter-by-chapter unlock pricing, which draws grumbling. It’s a defensible model: the first chapter is free, it’s a real slice of the game, and it lets you find out whether the slow opening is a dealbreaker before spending anything. Still, buy it once on Steam or Switch if you have the choice.

BROK the InvestiGator is an ambitious, uneven, moving piece of work that gets the hard parts right and fumbles the easy one. The hard parts: a branching structure built into player impatience rather than dialogue menus, a noir story about a father failing and trying anyway that earns its ending, and an accessibility implementation that reframes what’s technically possible in this genre. The easy part it fumbles: making a side-scrolling beat ‘em up feel good.

That trade is worth taking, with reservations. COWCAT could have shipped a clean, forgettable point-and-click and nobody would have complained. Instead they built something with a load-bearing idea — two ways through every wall — and let it reshape the entire game around it. The mediocre combat and sluggish opening are the cost of that idea existing at all, and for the right audience the math works out.

Play it on Switch or PC. Give the opening a few hours before judging the pacing. And if the fighting grates, turn it off — the game was built to survive that, which is more than most can say.