The Darkside Detective: Backside of the Moon demo teases plenty more zany cases

Backside of the Moon takes players back to Twin Lakes and the adventures of Detective McQueen and Officer Dooley.

This week, Spooky Doorway and Akupara Games put out the demo for the third game in their silly and surreal detective point-and-click adventure game, The Darkside Detective: Backside of the Moon, and I had a chance to play it! It’s not a long demo, but it shares a good sampling of the bizarre situations, silly antics, and mind-bending solutions that make Backside of the Moon look like it’s going to be a fun time for returning fans and newcomer puzzlers alike.

A little case of “don’t touch that” and “too late”

For those who don’t know, the Darkside Detective games are pixelated point-and-click adventure puzzle games. Like many such games, your goal is to navigate numerous screens as Detective McQueen and his hapless assistant, Officer Dooley, click on everything that looks interactable, talk to other characters, collect items, and ultimately put together solutions to help you move the story forward and solve mysteries along the way.

In Backside of the Moon, we’ll eventually get six cases, but the demo offers part of one of them. While sorting through a bunch of oddities for a recent raid, Dooley mistakenly rubs a mysterious orb that shrinks him and McQueen down to the size of mice. It was funny to navigate sleeping spiders, overly friendly rats, and mysterious fellow shrunken people. I also felt like the flow in the demo was intriguing and sensible I as tried to sort out the right keys to get myself up to the top of McQueen’s desk and get the info I needed to turn back into a regular guy, or perhaps a freakishly huge guy, as the other mouse-sized folk philosophized.

One of the things I dig most about Backside of the Moon is that it has those moments where it can be tricky or obtuse and stump you, but the game is very good at giving you as much or as little help as you want. You can adjust some settings so that the game will range from making you figure it out to practically giving you the answer if you hit a dead end. You can also use a certain button to reveal all interactable points on the screen (TAB by default), which is great for checking on what you can do at any given time. Backside of the Moon clearly carries lessons from its own history and other point-and-clicks to make a game that both feels satisfying to solve and will assist when you ask it to.

One pixel tall, and that’s just the start

If you haven’t ever been introduced to the cheek and charm of The Darkside Detective, but you like yourself a good point-and-click puzzler, you should probably have a look at the Backside of the Moon demo (and heck, you probably ought to check out the first two games, too). If you’re a returning fan, it looks like you’re in for more of a good thing. I enjoyed the silliness, zaniness, slight creepiness, and smart vibes of what I played in Backside of the Moon and I can’t wait to see more. Keep your eyes out for more as we await details like release dates as the game develops.

These impressions are based on play of the PC demo for the game supplied by the publisher. The Darkside Detective: Backside of the Moon is currently slated to release on PC.

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