Detective Hayseed - Hollywood Review

I'm a big fan of adventure games - specifically point-and-click ones. From the original release of Monkey Island, through Telltale’s Sam & Max and beyond, I've played more than my fair share. So when a small title such as Detective Hayseed crosses my desk, it piques my interest.

Detective Hayseed fits the bill of being a point-and-click adventure in the style of the classics. Stylised art, humourous tone, dick jokes… wait, no I suppose the art and tone are where the similarities end.

The plot of Hollywood is that the Academy Award winners list has been stolen. Unable to ask detectives such as Columbo and Jessica Fletcher, as they are too close to the case, Hollywood execs send out the call for Hayseed. Or, rather, the US President calls him.

This is some of the best animation in the game

As is usually the case with point-and-clicks, the interface is cursor-driven, and you can access your inventory at any time to try using everything you find with everything you see. Occasionally Hayseed will give you a funny line when it won’t work, but usually it just won’t let you use an item with something it doesn’t go with.

The puzzles are a mix of so simple you will solve them without realising you started it, to so frustrating that you have to go to YouTube to watch a walkthrough after twenty minutes of guessing.

Now, you may notice that I mentioned dick jokes earlier, of which there are several. The very first action you take when you assume control of the cursor, is to excite Hayseed’s cock to wake him up. Because he lives on a farm (for some reason), and has chickens and a cockerel in his bedroom. HAHAHAHAHA.

"LOOK AT HIS COCK!" - Basically the first 5 minutes of the game

This might have actually made me smile instead of roll my eyes, if it hadn’t been delivered by the most stilted voice over work I have ever experienced. It wasn’t even just bad in a PlayStation Resident Evil way, it was as if William Shatner’s Captain Kirk had delivered it, whilst groggy from too much codeine. The rest of the voice work isn’t much better, with a lot of it performed with unnecessary pauses. Sometimes entire words are mispronounced -- it’s cache as in cash, not cache as in Kaysha without the final a!

The script doesn’t help, as it has definitely lost something in translation. A number of jokes simply fall flat or don’t make sense, and would have benefitted from being rewritten. Especially since there are a lot of references to previous Detective Hayseed titles.

Wait, before you switch tabs to find out how many there are, you probably won’t find them. This is actually the sixth title in the Polda series, which means you missed little things such as why he has an alien son living with him, owns a flying car and a laser watch, and the significance of the ginger cat that keeps popping up. But don’t worry, absolutely none of it will be explained in any detail whatsoever, leaving you to fill in the blanks. For instance, I’m giving this game a lot of leeway by assuming Hayseed is dyslexic, instead of the voice actor’s delivery getting much worse whenever the character reads something.

Why yes, 7 of 9 is hooking up with Captain Picard in this game

With another three passes over the script and a completely new voice cast, Detective Hayseed would have been a decent adventure game. In its current state it’s hard to put up with -- especially Hayseed’s very annoying laugh. There is a decent game hidden inside, but you might want to keep the volume down and read the subtitles with a squint (because they have issues separate to the voice acting…).