The Drifter: The Aussie Point-and-Click Thriller With 'the Brake-Lines Cut'

Point-and-click adventures have a reputation for being slow. You wander, you click on everything, you combine a rubber chicken with a pulley, and eventually something happens. The Drifter opens with a man jumping a freight train, witnessing a murder, being chased by high-tech soldiers and drowning in a reservoir. Then it gets going.

The Drifter is made by Powerhoof, a two-person studio from Melbourne, Australia. It launched on Steam on 17 July 2025 for Windows, macOS and Linux. More than a year later, its Steam reviews sit at "Overwhelmingly Positive", with 97% of over 3,600 English-language reviews recommending it.

A man pulled back from death

You play Mick Carter, a drifter who moves from job to job and place to place. He hops a boxcar back to his old hometown, where he sees a violent killing, is hunted by soldiers with suspiciously advanced equipment and ends up thrown into a reservoir and drowned.

And then he is pulled back into his body seconds before death. Now he is framed for the murder he witnessed, and haunted by the feeling that something came back with him. The story spirals into shadowy corporations, conspiracy and a madman's thousand-year obsession.

Powerhoof sums the game up in one line: "A classic 2D point and click adventure with the brake-lines cut." It is a pulp thriller in the best sense: fast, lurid, full of twists and never ashamed of being a page-turner. Along the way Mick picks up an ally, an investigator named Hara.

Puzzles that keep the pace

Underneath the thriller is a proper adventure game. You explore pixel-art locations, from a seedy railway underpass to a graveyard at night, and solve investigative puzzles between story beats: doing things in the right order, combining found objects into makeshift tools and triggering events.

You can play with a mouse in the classic style or use a twin-stick controller setup. The interface includes features that cut down on guesswork, which helps the game keep its momentum. It is fully voice-acted, with pixel art full of punchy animation and a dark synth score that sounds like a lost 1980s thriller.

The studio behind Crawl

Powerhoof is Dave Lloyd, who handles the storytelling, and Barney Cumming, who leads the art direction, working with a team of pixel artists, musicians and voice actors. The duo is best known for Crawl, a local multiplayer dungeon game where one player is the hero and the others play the monsters trying to stop them. Their other games include Regular Human Basketball, Acid Knife and Peridium.

The Drifter is a big swing for a studio known for multiplayer chaos. It is story-heavy, single-player and dramatic, and it was self-published, with no outside publisher.

What the critics said

The Drifter has a Metacritic score of 84. Eurogamer gave it a perfect 10 out of 10, Adventure Game Hotspot 95% and Checkpoint Gaming 9/10. Not everyone was won over: PC Gamer gave it 70, praising its moody visuals but feeling the pulp story undercut them.

Players have been far less divided. Its Steam rating has stayed very high since launch, and it was still pulling "Very Positive" recent reviews more than a year later, a sign of a game that keeps finding new fans by word of mouth.

Why it matters

WGC's take: The Drifter is proof that the point-and-click adventure is far from dead. It simply needed someone to cut the brake-lines. By borrowing the pace and pulp of airport thrillers and Australian genre cinema, Powerhoof made a game that feels classic and urgent at the same time.

It also continues a quietly impressive run for Australian indies, alongside games like Hollow Knight: Silksong (read our story) and the outback life sim Dinkum (here).

The Drifter is available on Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux. If you like mysteries with a supernatural twist, try Urban Myth Dissolution Center (here).