Journey of a Roach Preview

Journey of a Roach is an adorable point-and-click adventure from KoboldGames that sees you playing as a cockroach in the aftermath of the nuclear apocalypse. Mutated to human size, you and your green-eyed buddy roach set out on an adventure to the surface of Earth, running into plenty of bizarre characters along the way.

During the preview build, I met a grandmother spider happily knitting little cocoons for her stash of sleepy baby flies. Yes, the game is filled with this kind of quirky twist on our normal understanding of buggy creatures.

Rather clumsily, we roaches accidentally knocked the flies over and had to scurry around the room, luring them back to their sleeping places. Each fly had to be captured by a different method, so there’s no dull repetition of solutions here. After catching one fly, grandmama spider helped us out with an item for the next. This keeps the game pretty linear but also avoids the dreaded inventory puzzles, so you’re continually progressing.

The cunning twist that you really need to get your head round is navigating each room. You’re a roach, so you can climb up walls to reach items and exits that you wouldn’t normally expect in a 2D adventure. Here’s a trailer video – gameplay snippets start at 0:30.

Can’t reach that item hanging from the ceiling? Simply climb up the side and reach out from a better vantage point. It takes a bit of getting used to but after an hour or so, you’ll be clambering all over the walls like a proper roach. Lucky there are no humans left to smack you with a rolled-up newspaper.

Journey of a Roach will be out on PC and Mac from Tuesday 5th November.