The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy

My first honest read on this one: the art does most of the heavy lifting, and for about four to five hours, that's just enough. You play as Eurico, the perpetually unpaid ex-pizza delivery guy apprenticed to Dog Mendonça, a werewolf occult detective who promptly vanishes after the opening scene and leaves you to run his caseload. The team technically includes Pazuul, a sixty-thousand-year-old demon stuffed into the body of a small girl, and a sentient severed gargoyle head, but both are sidelined fast and function mainly as background furniture. The actual work falls to Eurico alone, which wastes a genuinely interesting cast. As a point-and-click, the loop is old-school and unpretentious: explore hand-drawn locations, collect items, talk to NPCs, combine things until the plot advances. The puzzle difficulty sits on the lighter side, with a notebook in Eurico's jacket that functions as a soft hint system, outlining your current objectives without handing you the answer outright. The interrogation system adds a small wrinkle, asking you to choose between good-cop and bad-cop questioning approaches when pressing suspects for information. It rarely has meaningful consequences, but it gives conversations a little shape. Less welcome is the boxing minigame that ambushes you at certain story beats, mandatory to complete, with no tutorial and a reaction-based quick-time structure that clashes awkwardly with the rest of the experience. It is forgiving enough that most players will push through it, but it feels bolted on rather than designed in. The presentation is where the game earns its goodwill. Around thirty hand-drawn locations recreate a stylized Lisbon, and the environments are packed with visual easter eggs, including nods to 1980s and 1990s pop culture characters tucked into backgrounds. The jazz-inflected soundtrack suits the hard-boiled detective atmosphere well. Voice acting is competent in English and reportedly stronger in the German localization, though some lines repeat often enough to grate. The art style avoids the pixel-art default most modern point-and-clicks reach for, opting instead for high-quality 2D illustration with occasional 3D animated sequences, which gives it a look closer to a mid-nineties LucasArts production than anything released in 2016. The practical problems are real. Eurico walks at a pace that would frustrate a patient person, and there is no double-click fast travel to compensate. Cutscenes cannot be skipped. The resolution options are limited, and ultrawide screens have reported clipping issues with dialogue boxes. The story, meanwhile, starts as a gypsy-curse mystery, pivots to a hunt for the missing Dog, and by the final act has lost enough narrative momentum that the resolution lands with a shrug rather than a payoff. Comic book fans who know the source material from Dark Horse may find the adaptation softer and less gritty than expected. Newcomers will likely have an easier time of it, since there is no baggage to disappoint. Bottom line, this is a short, accessible, good-looking adventure for players who enjoy the genre without needing it to be demanding. If the setting intrigues you and you are not expecting a meaty mystery, it delivers a pleasant few hours with a cast worth meeting, even if the game never fully uses them.

Alex · Scout Team

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