The Great Sneeze review

The goal of any adventure game should be quite obvious from the category name alone, though it seems like a lot of titles in this genre--oddly--preoccupy themselves with putting up barriers that prevent said adventure from moving forward. The Great Sneeze does not have this problem and is much better off for it. Although it may not be in a class of its own for prioritizing progress over play time, The Great Sneeze is an accessible showcase of exactly how to do this and is very worthy of the small amount of attention it demands to enjoy.

The Great Sneeze is a point-and-click adventure game that centers on three friends who have been working all summer at an art museum. Just as said museum is set to open a special exhibit on the works of Caspar David Friederike, a museum staff member sneeze with such force that the entire museum is sent into disarray.

With mere hours until the exhibit opens, you have to maneuver the summer interns from room to room, identifying what needs to be fixed and how to fix it using a lot of familiar tropes and systems from point-and-click adventure games like item-gathering, completing mini-games, and decoding secret messages or codes to access new areas.

This may all sound pretty straightforward and boilerplate, and that's mostly because it is. Where The Great Sneeze separates itself is in how it directs you through its adventure. While many adventure games like to watch players squirm their way through oblique logical puzzles or hunt around for an obscured path forward, every step of The Great Sneeze is spelled out for you very clearly, to the point that characters may even announce what a found item should be used on next when you find it.

While this may take some of the "mystery" out of the game, the trade-off is an experience that is refreshing and breezy. You don't have to turn every location upside down looking for something you missed to avoid backtracking or run in circles just because you didn't notice a single pixel that directs you to the next puzzle. You just get to enjoy everything as it is. What a concept!

The decision to make The Great Sneeze a more directed experience makes it noteworthy where the rest of it is much less so. Characters are underdeveloped and most of the dialog is just about what to do next. Also--if not for the works of Friederike, there is not much visually that stands out. There are a couple of moments where I was surprised by a puzzle or mini-game design, but that's mostly because of how so much of the game lowered many of my expectations.

But! For a free game that seems mostly designed to be an educational tool, I think there's more to learn here than a few facts about a Romantic painter. Namely, you don't need a huge scale to make an experience feel like an adventure if you just lower some of the barriers to progress.

There could very well be someone reading this review thinking I'm espousing some kind of adventure game heresy and that the whole point of adventure games is to have fun twisting your brain in knots until you just trial-and-error your way into an item combination that barely makes sense. My only response to that is the games like that already exist, and if someone remade Full Throttle to play a bit more like The Great Sneeze, I probably would have thought it was a vastly better game than it is now.