Alum

I have a soft spot for small studios that bet everything on one earnest, handcrafted game, and Alum is exactly that kind of bet. Crashable Studios ran two Kickstarter campaigns, barely cleared a $10,000 goal the second time around, and still shipped something that feels more polished than its budget has any right to produce. That scrappiness reads in every corner of the game, for better and for worse. Mechanically, this is a classical point-and-click built in Adventure Game Studio, running at a retro 320x200 pixel resolution that wears its Golden Age Sierra DNA without embarrassment. You right-click to cycle through a compact set of actions, scroll the mouse wheel to flip through inventory items, and work through a seven-chapter structure that spans over 70 hand-drawn backgrounds ranging from the walled, robot-patrolled city of Kosmos to frozen wilderness tundra. Puzzles land in a comfortable middle zone: mostly inventory combinations and conversation sequences, with a built-in hint system that nudges rather than spoils. There is one action sequence on a heat tower that briefly breaks the genre mold, and it is skippable after a few failed attempts, which is the right call. The world map for travelling across the Land of Tide gives the journey a satisfying sense of geographic weight, and the original soundtrack blending live instruments with retro-synth electronics does quiet, effective work setting mood across locations. The first chapter is where Alum earns genuine goodwill. It opens in Kosmos, a city governed by the ominous Mayor Glym whose e-Bot robots keep order and whose heat towers keep the cold at bay. Alum himself is a courier for the Golden Stork postal service whose wife Esther has been struck by The Vague, a disease that draws its victims into apathy and silence. That premise carries real emotional weight, and the early sections mixing sci-fi dystopia with underground rebel meetings and locked-door inventory puzzles feel like the best kind of throwback. Then the allegory arrives and decides it is done being quiet. The game is openly framed as a Christian parable, with the Rogations resistance group, a mysterious potion called a Rushlight, and a benevolent deity called the Unfeigned Altruist mapping onto familiar theology with decreasing distance as the chapters progress. Reviewers split sharply on this: those who connect with the themes find the story earnest and moving through to its conclusion; those who do not will hit a wall somewhere around Chapter 3 and feel lectured to rather than guided. That split, more than any technical flaw, explains the mixed reception the game has carried since 2015. The voice acting is a real liability regardless of where you land on the thematic question. With a tight budget, the cast skews toward family members of the developers, and the results are uneven in ways that hurt a game where so much of the runtime lives inside its dialogue. Some scenes survive on the strength of the writing; others feel like they needed one more pass with a director in the room. The hand-drawn backgrounds and pixel character art are consistently the game's highest point, and the soundtrack is genuinely worth listening to on its own. If you enjoy old-school adventures and have tolerance for fiction with a strong spiritual message delivered without much disguise, there are seven chapters and roughly eight to ten hours of content here that reward patience.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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