BROK the InvestiGator

I have a soft spot for solo developers who swing well above their weight class, and COWCAT's Fabrice Breton is exactly that kind of creator. Six years of work went into BROK the InvestiGator, and you feel that investment in almost every scene. What landed in 2022 is a game that refuses to be one thing: part point-and-click adventure, part Streets-of-Rage-style brawler, part RPG with branching consequences, and underneath all of that, an unexpectedly sincere story about a grieving father-figure trying to hold his little family together in a polluted, class-divided dystopia. The world splits cleanly into two societies. Drumers live inside a protective dome, breathing clean air and surrounded by Tribot servants. Slumers live outside, taking government pills daily just to survive the toxic atmosphere. Brok, a former boxing champion turned private investigator, was once a Drumer until his wife Lia died and he was cast out. Now he scrapes by taking cases and fighting in underground arenas to make rent, while trying to raise Graff, Lia's teenage son, who desperately wants to pass his exam and escape the Slums for good. That fractured step-parent relationship is quietly the emotional backbone of everything. More than the cases themselves, it is the question of whether Brok and Graff can actually reach each other that keeps you pushing forward. The dual-mode gameplay is the hook that makes BROK genuinely interesting as a design exercise. In Adventure Mode you do classic point-and-click work: combining items, interrogating characters, piecing together clues, and confronting suspects with evidence pairs you select from your case notes. Flip to Action Mode with a single button press and the cursor vanishes; Brok becomes a brawler with a basic attack, jump, block, and a special move that only unlocks after he drops below half health. Inventory items can double as weapons, and levelling up lets you distribute points into health, strength, or that special attack. The crossover between modes is where the game finds its cleverness: a locked gate can be solved with the right key crafted from junk in your inventory, or you can simply kick it down. Some puzzles only yield to brains; some situations will not let you think your way out. Your ratio of fists to footwork also feeds into which of the 11 endings you reach, so the "brain or brawn" framing actually carries mechanical weight. A hidden collectible system called Ads, scatter QR codes across every area. Find enough and you can redeem them as hints, which keeps frustration manageable without feeling like hand-holding. Honesty requires noting the friction. The first chapter is genuinely slow. Multiple reviewers flagged it, and they are right. The opening case, helping a kangaroo cop find his lost gun, does not announce the emotional territory the game eventually occupies. Commit past that wall and the story rewards you, but patience is required. The combat is the other fair complaint: basic attack, jump, block, and a handful of combos covers most of what you will ever do in a fight. Levelling feels thin. For players coming in wanting a full brawler experience, the action depth will disappoint. The animation has some stiffness too, which sits slightly at odds with the gorgeous 90s Saturday-morning-cartoon art style, all bold lines and warm colour palettes that feel like TMNT left in a slightly more serious world. The voice acting, though, is remarkable for a solo-developed title, with over 23,000 lines performed across the full run, and the soundtrack earns its atmospheric weight. Post-launch, the game added local co-op for up to four players with six playable characters, which is a genuinely unusual feature for this genre. The Brawl Bar DLC arrived in 2025 as a more action-heavy companion piece if you want more of the brawler side. The base game itself runs somewhere between 10 and 15 hours depending on pace, with multiple playthroughs practically inviting themselves through the chapter-select and the promise of endings you definitely did not see the first time. For solo narrative adventure players who can forgive shallow combat in service of a story that actually earns its emotional beats, this is one of the more honest surprises in recent indie memory.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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