Fowl Business: Chicken Police - Into the HIVE!
Crime, mystery, and a lotta talking, see?
‣ Chicken Police: Into the HIVE!
From: The Wild Gentlemen, Joystick Ventures
Platforms: PC
Release: Coming soon
Steam Page • Demo Video
Writing about the demo of a noir narrative adventure starring two chickens is surprisingly hard.
The noir genre doesn’t beg much qualification, but you still need a sense that this is a real ‘dark and stormy night’ vibe game with conspiracy, backstabbing, and quite a lot of scene-chewing dialogue. The narrative adventure/visual novel element makes sense to genre fans, yet others might overlook how well this game excels at the medium. And the animals in human clothes, blended beautifully with photography and digital editing, are the heart of the game.
Chicken Detectives: Into The HIVE! is a fun and cheeky story-driven adventure featuring two chickens out to crack a missing person case. To do so, they must travel to Roachtown, aka the Hive, the area in the city of Clawville where the insects live.
In the demo, it takes about an hour to get to the Hive area because, first, there is a lot of talking. A lot of talking. This being a narrative game, the fun is in the journey and the banter between characters, recorded by professional voice actors (no AI, says this developer).
Complementing the chatter are high-resolution animated poses of the characters featuring well-dressed actors with an assortment of animal heads, changing their posture to exaggerate the conversations.
Along the way, the player influences matters with branching narratives, visiting locations, and solving puzzles, incorporating some classic adventure game mechanics.
Being the second game in the series (but you don’t need to play the first to get into this title), things are very polished, and the developers have the confidence to try a few new ideas. These touches and focus on quality make Chicken Police: Into The HIVE! attractive to players who aren’t necessarily fans of visual novels.
It’s a very noir game (crime-centric, fatalistic, and attracted to moody jazz soundtracks). The graphics are even in black and white, though there is a colour mode if you find things too monotone. But you’ll never find the writing lacking in colour.
Chicken Police: Into The HIVE! knows what it is but still adds enough exciting features to interest people who aren’t into this genre. The fun dialogue, entertaining art, and serious-about-not-being-too-serious “clucking” attitude deliver a very polished adventure game that will satisfy fans and maybe introduce a few newcomers to this noir comedy series.
📽 Demo Snapshot: What’s a noir without detectives giving each other grief?
Explore The Game with Youtube Chapters:
📽 01:10 Very noir
📽 02:01 The chickens come home
📽 08:39 To the station
📽 08:57 Noir and Color mode
📽 13:16 Unfriendly rivalry
📽 14:49 Let's try color mode
📽 24.42 At the gun range
📽 37:08 Some aspirin, please
📽 44:42 Into the Hive
📽 47:50 A mysterious lady
📽 51:17 One tough slug
📽 55:38 Back to color
📽 58:29 What happens next?
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