All the Troubles Come My Way by Sam Dunnachie
The premise of All the Troubles Come My Way is exceptionally silly: you are a cowboy who has been transported 150 years into the future. You wake up in a bathtub (an empty one) and the point of the game is to find your missing cowboy hat. Or procure another hat that suits you. But this premise is worked out with a lot of what we can maybe call southern charm, as well as tobacco grit, and when all else fails, a real sense of rodeo, so I think we should say that Sam Dunnachie does cowboy justice to it. Those are the four ‘stats’ of the game, and mechanically, much of the gameplay consists in finding ways to increase these stats, since you’ll need different stats to follow different paths to a cowboy hat. Cowboy Justice allows you to find your real hat; Southern Charm allows you to out-hustle the hat-wearing hustler; and I assume that the other two stats unlock their own paths (it’s strongly hinted at that Tobacco Grit will allow you to go to the discount shop).
It’s all genuinely charming. My favourite part was probably that involving the IKEA manual and the table, but all the interactions are well-written and inventive. So I enjoyed my time with the game. It’s not a long time; All the Troubles Come My Way is very short. Indeed, the stat raising part in the apartment lasts longer than the actual quest to retrieve a hat, which feels a bit unbalanced. But it’s a minor complaint. This entry is not very ambitious, but it delivers the entertainment it wants to deliver, and doesn’t outstay its welcome.