Sunday Gold Hands-On Preview

ign.com:

In the hunt for something genuinely new, more and more developers are creating hybrids; smashing two genres together to make a wonderful Frankenstein’s monster of a game. Sunday Gold is one of the more enjoyably odd of these experiments I’ve seen in recent years. A mashup of Final Fantasy and Broken Sword, this slick-looking comic book crime drama is, bizarrely, a turn-based point-and-click adventure. And, from the three hours I’ve played so far, the combination appears to work surprisingly well.

Set in near-future London, where it’s always raining and the billionaires are fatter than they’ve ever been, Sunday Gold puts you in control of a trio of criminals attempting to bring down Kenny Hogan, the corrupt head of a massive corporation. The chunk I’ve played is cut from the very start, with the group’s objective being to infiltrate Hogan’s offices and steal a hard drive-full of incriminating data.

The quest for that data plays out, at least on the surface, like a pretty classic point-and-click adventure. Akin to your Monkey Islands and Gabriel Knights, you explore a bunch of locations in search of clues and items that fit together into a puzzle solution. CCTV needs to be disabled, drains need to be flooded to bring their contents to the surface, and secret passwords need to be unearthed from hidden spots. In the tradition of the genre, Sunday Gold embraces the pixel hunt; I spent a lot of time hovering my mouse over a room’s every item in search of something that could be picked up or interacted with.

But it’s when those items are found that Sunday Gold tears up the LucasArts rulebook. Firstly, you have three protagonists, each skilled in a different art. Found a door that won't open? You’ll need to have Frank apply his