The Mystery of the Druids is a game steeped in mystique and memes just from that wild face on the box art. But the oddities of this game run much, much deeper. tMotD breaks and adheres to point-and-click tradition at once in bringing us the antihero Brent Halligan. He's a slob, a jerk, a conspiracy theorist, and he owes the pizza place like 300 bucks. And yet, after his fellow detectives wrongly convict an innocent man of murder, it's up to Brent to catch the real killer. To do this, Brent will steal, lie, cheat, and other standard point-and-click tactics...only he's been behaving this way his entire life, even outside the game, and his colleagues are already sick of it by the time you join him. The folks of Scotland Yard will refuse to lend Brent pocket change, they'll forbid him access to the police database, they won't even lend him scissors. The more you progress through the game, the more you'll understand why--suffice to say, some of the tactics that comprise the game's puzzle solutions will get you chewed out by Chief Inspector Miller in later scenes. To be clear, there's no "paragon" path or anything. In fact, the game is quite linear overall. And while I'm at it, lots of the puzzles are obtuse, graphics are shoddy even by 2001 standards, and there's no actual mystery in this mystery game. But the game as a sort of satire is certainly interesting. Brent is the only man who can catch the murderer in the act, because he's the only one on the force who's cuckoo enough for a stranger to tell him "there's a cabal of magicians infiltrating the government" and believe it so fervently that he'll break into one of their estates. Brent is an adventure game protagonist transplanted into the real world, err, in adventure game format--sorta like Street Fighter: The Movie, the game. tMotD itself is not a particularly good adventure game by any stretch. But as a form of adventure game meta-commentary, it's definitely worth its sale price (or at least a YouTube search).
