Point-and-click adventures have never exactly been known for their restraint, but Earth Must Die takes the genre’s more ridiculous tendencies and launches them into space. Developed by Size Five Games and published by No More Robots, the game puts players in control of VValak Lizardtongue, an immensely self-important alien ruler whose route to the throne is about as legitimate as his understanding of leadership. When his empire’s problems eventually lead him towards Earth, the result is a science-fiction comedy that is far more interested in making fun of its protagonist, politics and the conventions of adventure games than in telling a particularly sophisticated story. That works largely because VValak is such an entertainingly awful character to spend time with.
The narrative itself is deliberately absurd, but that does not necessarily mean it is particularly unpredictable. VValak’s rise to power, his incompetence as a leader and his increasingly destructive plans provide plenty of opportunities for black comedy, while Milky, his strange nursing-bot-turned-personal-assistant, provides a useful counterweight to his enormous ego. The writing is at its best when it embraces the sheer stupidity of the situation and allows characters to make terrible decisions for wonderfully petty reasons. Not every joke lands equally well, however, and the deliberately crude humor, sexual references and political satire can occasionally feel more interested in provoking a reaction than delivering a genuinely clever punchline. Still, the sheer commitment to the tone makes the adventure difficult to confuse with anything else.
Where Earth Must Die really distinguishes itself is in how it reworks the traditional adventure-game formula. There is no conventional inventory stuffed with increasingly unlikely objects, and solving problems is generally less about combining things than it is about gathering information and manipulating people. Dialogue is effectively the player’s main tool. By learning more about characters and their circumstances through the Milkipedia, new conversational possibilities can be uncovered, allowing VValak to persuade, deceive or otherwise push people into doing the work for him. It is a clever match between character and mechanics: an unbelievably lazy dictator would naturally prefer manipulating everyone else to actually lifting a finger himself.
That idea is initially very satisfying, particularly when the game allows players to discover some piece of information and then use it to pull an unsuspecting character’s strings. Unfortunately, the novelty does diminish over time. Because there is no inventory to create a huge range of potential combinations, the number of possible solutions is often fairly restricted, which makes many puzzles easier than those found in more traditional point-and-click adventures. There are moments where the logic becomes deliberately convoluted, and the occasional solution can feel more like guessing the developer’s thought process than following a completely natural chain of deduction. On the other hand, the game avoids the classic adventure-game frustration of combining every object with everything else just to discover what works, so its relative simplicity can also be seen as a welcome modernisation.
The controls are similarly caught between old-school adventure conventions and a more modern approach. Rather than simply clicking a destination, VValak can be moved directly around the environments, while interactions are handled through a cursor system. It takes some adjustment, particularly for anyone expecting a traditional point-and-click setup, and the lack of a straightforward click-to-move option is an odd choice for a game so heavily rooted in that tradition. Interactions can also become awkward when several usable elements are close together or when the camera makes it less obvious what can actually be selected. These issues do not destroy the experience, but they occasionally interrupt the otherwise enjoyable flow.
Visually, however, Earth Must Die makes a considerably stronger impression. The hand-drawn environments and characters have the exaggerated appearance of an animated comedy series, with colorful alien designs, expressive faces and an abundance of bizarre creatures that help make even relatively ordinary locations worth examining. The game also gets a lot of mileage from its presentation, with a detailed interface and environments in which seemingly incidental elements can contribute to the overall personality of a scene. At times that richness can make the screen a little harder to read, but it is difficult to fault the amount of imagination that has gone into the game’s universe. The animation is particularly effective at selling the personalities of characters who might otherwise be little more than vehicles for jokes.
The audio is arguably even more impressive, thanks to a remarkably strong voice cast that gives the game’s increasingly ridiculous characters plenty of personality. The performances help sell both the straight-faced delivery and the deliberately exaggerated humor, and they are an important reason why some of the weaker jokes still manage to land. The soundtrack is more functional than memorable, providing suitable accompaniment without competing with the dialogue, which is understandably the star of the show. Ultimately, Earth Must Die is not going to redefine the point-and-click adventure, and its puzzle design, controls and occasionally overbearing humor keep it from reaching that level. What it does provide, though, is a highly distinctive comedy adventure with a wonderfully obnoxious protagonist, a beautifully animated world and enough sharp writing to make its stranger ideas work. It is at its best when its mechanics, presentation and comedy all point in the same direction, turning the act of manipulating everyone around VValak into both the central gameplay loop and the game’s biggest joke.
Score: 7.5/10