Pants Quest. The quest for pants. The quest meant specifically for pants. We’ve all done it. We wake up in the morning and have to search for the clothes we need for the day. But the more we try to find them, the more goes wrong.
That’s the premise of Pants Quest from Melbourne indie studio Ghost Cat. The name itself feels like a throw back to old PC games like Police Quest and Space Quest and the point and click style only reinforces that. The story is simple and the game fairly short. My first play through took about an hour and a half due to getting stuck on one of the puzzles. A second clocked in at around 40 minutes.
If you know point and click games most of the puzzles are fairly straight forward. The main goal is to find your pants, but there’s also a to do list that has other objectives. It involves doing daily activities around the house. You don’t need to do all of them as this is a Pants Quest, not a Random Stuff Quest.
Having optional objectives fits into what I see as the main narrative of the game. This review’s first paragraph was flippant and meant as a kind of fun intro, but there’s truth in it as well. Just like Pants Quest. There’s a frame of mind that the character is in that I’ve definitely been in myself, and I’m sure most people have at some point. When things start going wrong and it all just snowballs. You can’t find your pants, you drop your coffee, you burn your toast. It just goes on and on until you want to curl up in a ball and just disappear. It made me empathise with the character and hear the sarcasm in his lines because it’s exactly what I would do.
Having objectives that are optional speak to the mind set of the character. When you’re in the mood he is in you don’t want to clean up the spilt coffee or pick up the mess. But you can do it. You can push through those feelings and at the end of the game you get congratulated for all the things that you have achieved.
While I appreciated the main character’s remarks I felt like there were times when it dragged on. Having a skip text option would be a welcome addition to Pants Quest.
Pants Quest is a short but fun exploration of what it’s like to have anxiety. It’s length makes it ideal as a game play when you just need a little distraction from the world. Pants Quest releases on Steam on the 1st March 2022.
