If the adventure genre truly is dead, it's the kind of dead you find mulling about in a shoestring budget zombie flick. All visible signs point to a loss of life, but the supposed corpse is still surprisingly animated, shambling towards you in search of an exposed brain. Before you know it, you've been surrounded and your only choices concern the order in which you lose vital body parts. While Atlus' Touch Detective is likely a good deal more fun than being eaten alive by a snarling, undead force (that quote coming to a review soon!), it forms a firm part of the genre's inability to stay beneath the ground.
A traditional adventure game in almost every sense, Touch Detective joins Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Trace Memory on the portable platform that seems to have been made for pointing and clicking. Or rather, touching. The DS lends itself well to typical adventure gameplay mechanics, though a functional interface does not a good game make. The story, the characters and the puzzles are the elements you'll remember as being stellar or awful. Touch Detective promises to lump itself into the former and largely preferable category as it follows the adventures of a young sleuth searching for answers, culprits and stolen dreams. Using our finely attuned detective and e-mailing skills, we grilled the game's project lead, Jamie Ortiz, about the game, localization and questionably shaped mushrooms:
