Video Game / BROK the InvestiGator

BROK the InvestiGator is a hybrid Beat 'em Up / Point-and-Click Game, referred to by its marketing as a "PUNCH & CLICK". The game was developed and published by Cowcat, who also created Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure. Following a "Prologue" version of Brok for PC in December 2020, and a successful Kickstarter campaign, the full game was officially released on August 26, 2022.

No relation to Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime, another point and click game about a detective alligator, or to the InvestiGators graphic novels.

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BROK the InvestiGatropes:

• After the End: The game's setting is advertised as "light cyberpunk", with a class divide between privileged citizens (Drumers) that live in protected dome cities and the lower-class (Slumers) having to make a living dealing with ambient air pollution in the surrounding barren wastelands. And then there's the whole matter of humanity going extinct in the setting's history.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One of the reoccurring enemy types in the game is robots, usually fought in the context of them malfunctioning (such as one stuck in a loop of demanding a street peddler to explain why they're operating without a license and threatening to shoot them for not complying). In the endgame, it's averted, as bots start intentionally coming after either Brok or Doctor Gherkin (depends on the choice taken) due to Wes wanting them dead.
• Amnesiac Hero: After the accident that took Lia's life, both her son Graff and her current husband Brok developed partial amnesia, partly due to the trauma and the medication side-effects but mostly due to temporal shenanigans. This has some unfortunately far-reaching repercussions, as some of Graff's resentment towards Brok is from the belief that Brok is keeping secrets about his past from him, when Brok can't remember all of his past.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: After Brok gets in trouble during his investigation, the scene switches to his son Graff and his own struggles. After playing as him for a while, the perspective switches back to Brok, and they alternate as the playable protagonist from that point onwards.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Near the end of the game, Brok is required to perform an investigation and can only make six failures before Dee decides to give her data to Wes, who immediately betrays them. However, if Brok tries to put two clues together that are both still related to his overall deduction but not the specific idea Brok's trying to form, it won't count as a failure.
  • After seeing the Choice-and-Consequence System results screen once, making any important choice while replaying the game will immediately show the player how it affects the Relationship Values and Brok's Brains/Brawns, making it easier to work towards endings that are dependent on specific values.
• Anyone Can Die: Due to the various endings and Video Game Cruelty Potential, any character (including Brok and/or Graff) can die depending on your actions, except Dr. Gherkin, since killing him will result in a Non-Standard Game Over. Achieving certain endings requires plot-central characters like Dee, Sin, R.J., or Ott to perish, and no matter what you do Wes and the Director will die in the canon ending. The closest to an "Everybody Dies" Ending would be reaching the "Fall" ending and killing everyone except Ott and Dr. Gherkin.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: There's a consumable item called Helios Energy Drink containing "concentrated helium" which temporarily boosts the power of Brok/Graff's attacks. In real life, helium doesn't actually improve someone's strength; at best, it gives them a high-pitched voice if inhaled.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Brok and Graff does this in the fittingly named "Fight Together" ending, and they teamed up beforehand to reduce a small army of Tribots at the Garbage Dumps to scrap metals before Ott arrives and wipes out the rest of them with a device he found at the police department.
• Big Bad: Nearly everything about the case Brok investigates, from Sin's unjust treatment to the cause of the Pipe-Pills' sabotage at the Slums, can be traced back to Prototype-26, AKA Wes post-Unwilling Roboticisation.
• Bittersweet Ending: Every ending is one of these. The majority them involve one of Brok's friends being erased in a paradox due to the time loop of the "Canonical" ending never occurring, and the "Canonical" ending itself involves Graff permanently distancing himself from Brok and Brok going back in time to try and make things better with no indication that it'll actually turn out better than it has in the previous loop.
  • The closest to a Golden Ending would be "Slumer" and if everyone except Wes and the Director is saved.
• Bottle Episode: Chapter 4 mostly takes place in one location. Brok's storyline takes place in a laboratory as he tries to solve a murder with Ott, while Graff's takes place within a bunker he's locked inside of with Klay.
• Bottomless Pit: There's one in the Squealers' hideout in the same cell Graff is held hostage in. Should you accidentally fall, you die instantly.
• Cannot Spit It Out: The Secret Locker ending reveals that Shay harbored romantic feelings for Brok, but she couldn't tell him partly because she never found the courage to say how she truly felt for him.
• Choice-and-Consequence System: After clearing the game for the first time, a new menu opens up which summarizes all of the major actions the player had taken and what the consequences were, from how it affected relationships to whether it affected another event later on.
• Clear My Name: Brok's client, Sin Silver, is a kangaroo who's embroiled in a rather significant conspiracy but needs Brok's help to prove he isn't actually involved in it.
• The Commissioner Gordon: Wes the otter, who used to be a mere investigator when Brok started his career but has been promoted to police commissioner over time. Even though Wes has his grievances with Brok, such as blaming him for a death until it's scientifically proven that Brok's conscience is clean, he still tries to stay on good terms and even calls Brok directly for assistance on occasion.
• Conlang: The setting has its own fictional language that can be translated into English, which is vital to decoding some locks and accessing some secrets such as the locker tied to the "Secret Locker" achievement.
• Cutting the Knot: Because the player can shift from "investigation" to "fight" mode at any time, some puzzles can be "solved" simply by beating up a door or person.
• Carnivore Confusion: Averted, with most characters subsisting on Pampalos fruits, insects (with antburgers and pizzants being the notable example), and non-anthropomorphic fish.
• Developer's Foresight: As to be expected of the genre.
  • Getting onto some things with other characters onscreen, or hitting said characters, elicits appropriate responses.
  • At some point, you can get access to a "book" that has 999 pages, all but one of which are the same image from the third on. If you're crazy/bored/masochistic enough to go all the way to the final page, your efforts are rewarded with a page that gives you 49,999 Unis.
  • During interrogation sections, pairing two things that are clearly connected but aren't what the game is looking for at that moment usually gives you different dialogue than other failed pairs.
  • Late in the game, you will need to use a certain item in a previously visited location to open another area. Do this earlier, however, and you can find a bonus scene.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The song that plays for the game's endings, "Forget With Time", has vocals provided by Bryan J. Olson and Michael Kovach, who voices Brok and Graff respectively.
• Earth All Along: A museum accessible late in the game has a human skeleton on display, titled "Tamed Earthian", that was recovered from the bottom of an ocean and is from a literal million years before the "Great Rebirth" of the setting's history.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The investigation that takes up most of Day 4 can be completely skipped in a way that also awards an achievement: jump on the unconscious body of supposedly dead Dr. Hush until he wakes up.
  • The confrontation with the Big Bad at the end of the game is set up as the final test of your fighting skills, but if the player focused more on puzzle solving, there's also a different option treated by the Choice-and-Consequence System as its own branch: using a remote control when the boss is standing on a puddle to cause an electrical short-circuit.
• Everybody Lives: Technically the "Rupture" ending if you save everyone and have Graff successfully escape the Squealers.
• Expressive Health Bar: In addition to the health bar with the numbers that show how much life points Brok and Graff have left, their faces can be seen on the left and depending on how much health they have left, the expression on their faces change. When they are healthy they are happy, excited, or calm. When they have lost a significant amount of health they are angry, when they are almost dead they look sad, beaten up, worried, or scared, and when dead their face gets crossed out.
• Fantastic Caste System: The relationship between the upper-class Drumers and the lower-class Slumers is quite tense; the Drumers consider the Slumers beneath them and try to make as little direct contact as possible, using artificial intelligences as intermediaries, while the Slumers struggle to make ends meet and actually improving their social standing is impossible for all but a select few. And if you happen to fail the exams then you are eternally condemned to be a Slumer for the rest of your life.
• Fictional Age of Majority: In Atlasia, you become a legal adult at 16. Despite his character ref sheet saying that he's already at that age, in the game itself Graff is actually 15, and would have his 16th birthday a few days after the main story happens.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: In the endgame, Graff receives a bank invoice stating that his deceased mother's account currently contains 100,000 Unis, which he will inherit upon his sixteenth birthday. On the path to every endings sans Drumer, Graff immediately spends it all on paying The Gloom/Hacker to change his test score. What makes this absolutely heart-wrenching is that Graff uses the invoice to accuse Brok of only caring about him for the inheritance, only to be told that the money is Brok's, who had access to the account and had deposited 50 Unis every day for the past five years so that Graff wouldn't be broke once he became a Drumer.
• Furry Lens: Zig-zagged. In the game, the anthropomorphic characters refer to themselves as "humans", but they also refer to their respective animal species as well, such as the Hacker, who insists being called a "mouse" instead of a "rat". This might have something to do with the world taking place after humans went extinct on Earth. This is lampshaded in the "Cynical" Ending, where Bjorn is confused over Brok calling himself a human like he is.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Brok will sometimes panic and remark that he should "get going" after taking a nap on the bed at his apartment or on the one at Shay's garage. However, the passage of time is dependent on plot-progression for the most part.
• Happily Adopted: Graff isn't Brok's biological son; Graff's biological father Remn left him and his mother when he was young, and Lia later died in an accident, with Brok taking him in since he loved her. However, the "Happily" isn't constant, as Graff resents Brok for frequently putting his investigation work over family matters.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Brok and Graff can restore their health by eating foods they find, usually from breaking open crates in the Virtual Arena. However, they will sometimes find rotten Pampalos fruits that only heal them by a mild margin.
• Ironic Echo: Graff's first trial to apply for Drumer status is a multiple-choice exam, which slips in a question of whether he'd save his friend or ten strangers; there's no "correct" answer, though the test results state that with more context, it would've been whichever option saves the most Drumers. Towards the end of the game, the Squealers Chief asks a kidnapped Graff the same question, and then appears to go through with killing either Ott or a bunch of hospital patients via hidden explosives before revealing that he was just messing with the kid.
• Karma Meter: The game tracks when Brok and Graff use their Brains or their Brawns to solve a problem, with some events changing depending on if one is favored over the other; most notably, high enough Brawns towards the end of the game will lead to the "Fall" ending, where Brok kills the Squealers Chief and then accidentally kills Graff in the middle of a heated argument. As they're tracked on the same meter, a silly decision that lowers Brains can also be interpreted as increasing Brawns.
• Kill the Poor: Near the end of the game, due to the Slums' Pipe-Pills getting sabotaged, many Slumers (except Brok) are at risk of dying to the Haze since they no longer have an easy time getting/stockpiling their daily Toxout pills. Only a single Drumer, Dr. Gherkin, is concerned about the matter. It turns out that Wes, who is part of the Triangle, damaged the Pipe-Pills for this purpose, as the vast majority of criminals he's dealt with over the years have been Slumers.
• Loophole Abuse: Dr. Gherkin claims that the only way for the government to pass anything is through unanimous decision, but multiple criminals have been executed recently without his consent. Wes, when he reveals his treachery, admits he has been rewording the decisions from "should this criminal be executed" to "should this criminal be let free" and then taking advantage of the resulting ambiguity of what should happen to them.
• The Lost Lenore: Brok's wife (who was also Graff's mother) was killed in a mysterious accident long ago, which is what motivated him into becoming an investigator.
• The Many Deaths of You: There are no less than thirty ways Brok and Graff can perish in the game, including zapped by a laser grid, being beaten to death, falling down a Bottomless Pit, swallowing a pill that makes you grow too much fur, and so on. The game even keeps track of all the various ways you die in the menu.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Ott, Graff's friend and the nephew of Wes, is a hybrid of two different anthropomorphic animals rather than a purebred, which has given him an in-game reputation as an "ugly halfbreed".
• Modular Epilogue: After reaching an ending, while the credits run, scenes play that are dependent on which major characters survived or died.
• Multiple Endings: There are eleven notable ways the game can end, including the "Canonical" ending, which are tracked and tied to the Achievement "Main Endings". An extra scene is unlocked for viewing them all.
• Necessary Fail: In order to reach the "Canonical" ending, a fair amount of this needs to occur; if they don't, a different ending is earned, with a hint outright stating that you need to fail in order to continue down the main path:
  • Graff has to fail graduating from the Drumer tests, as otherwise he doesn't need to make a deal with The Gloom/Hacker to change his test score, which leads to getting kidnapped by the Squealers.
  • Graff also has to fail escaping from the Squealers, as otherwise he doesn't obtain an anachronistic photo of Brok beating up the Squealers years ago (as Brok first met the gang at the start of the game).
  • Brok has to fail at getting Graff to trust him, as otherwise Graff doesn't have an argument with Brok over the anachronistic photo taken from the Squealers.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: As part of Brok's first investigation, he needs to enter the local Drumer city, but his status as a Slumer prevents him from entering freely. This is solved by hacking into the system to temporarily change his registration to declare he's a Drumer... unaware that Graff's tests to legally become a Drumer have a forty-point penalty if your mentor is a Drumer, making all of Graff's work for naught unless he had aced literally every test.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There are also a lot of ways to get a Game Over, such as being defeated in combat, getting cut by a power saw, ingesting a medicine with random effects, and picking a fight with and killing your own client, with the game keeping track of both general failures and Chapter-specific ones that the player experiences.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup:
  • A non-dangerous variant; save for a single physical photograph owned by Brok, all of the pictures, recordings, and documents about Graff's mother/Brok's beloved were digitally stored in a single location and then accidentally wiped out in a slums-wide power outage.
  • A slightly-dangerous variant occurs late in the game, as Dee has recorded all of her research concerning government corruption in a single flash drive, which is nearly taken by Wes and gets "protected" by Brok trying to swallow it.
• Potty Emergency: Ott suffers one in Chapter 3 while he's working inside of Wes' office. Brok has to "persuade" him to leave and use the bathroom so he can rifle through Wes' computer. Or he can knock out Ott, which will lead to Ott "relieving" himself.
• Production Throwback: The "Cynical" ending has Brok appear in the Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure universe as a result of breaking Shay's restored time machine.
• Protagonist Title: The game's central character, and one of the two that are playable, is the titular Brok, an investigator that's also an alligator.
• Relationship Values: The game tracks the relationships between various characters, such as Brok-Graff, Brok-Sin, and Graff-Ott, which can effect how certain events involving said characters play out.
• Replay Mode: After beating the game once, the player unlocks the ability to replay specific chapters instead of having to start the game over from scratch, to make it easier to reach all of the Multiple Endings.
• Resting Recovery: Brok can take a nap on the bed at his apartment to fully restore his health. He can also get some shuteye using the one at Shay's garage near the Virtual Arena cabin, but it will costs him 5 Unis to use it each time.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • The final, hour-long trial that Graff and his peers must take to apply for Drumer status; they're informed when it starts, but not told what to do, which Graff's friend Ott attributes to how real life doesn't always give you clear instructions on how to succeed. Klay, in comparison, decides to just quit early and take the rest of the day off, coasting on his previous high grades.
  • In the main story branch, after Graff's trials are over, a second test of his character occurs: He's failed to qualify for Drumer status, but is told by the Director that the results won't be submitted until the next morning. Graff interprets this as her giving a hint that he can still "pass" by finding a way to hack the server and change his grade. Laser-Guided Karma occurs immediately after he goes through with cheating to get ahead, where he and Ott gets kidnapped by the Squealers after using Unis from his deceased mother's bank account to pay The Gloom/Hacker for his services.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Inverted with every character's given name, which has only one syllable.
• Shadow Dictator: Drumer government, also referred to as "the Triangle", is powerful enough to control the media and judge prisoners but its actual members are a well-guarded secret. Dr. Gherkin is one member, and as "triangle" implies, there are three members at any one time. Soon after, Wes and the Director turn out to be the other two points.
• Shout-Out: One character encountered late in the game is a bespectacled, white-feathered stork named Dr. Gherkin, named after a type of pickle, referencing the stork mascot of Vlasic Pickles.
• Sigil Spam: A more creative version due to it focusing on a simple shape instead of a set design. The Government is composed of three people, and thus is sometimes called the Triangle. Players will notice very soon that nearly everywhere, particularly in the Drums, are triangles. Even things that are normally square or rectangular are triangular. Motifs, signs, buttons, lights, locks, devices, stickers, robot chassis, almost everything is or has something on them in the shape of a triangle. It helps drive home just how much the Triangle influences the lives of citizens.
• Stable Time Loop: The "Canonical" ending. After the Slums are saved but Graff has left out of frustration, Brok receives a letter from Shay, and realizes that Shay's built a time machine, explaining a photo of himself from years ago that shouldn't be possible. When Brok uses the machine, he encounters a forgotten past memory of himself that wishes him the best of luck this time, and then warps himself five years into the past to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and try to change the future for Graff's sake by saving Lia.
• The Stinger: There are two additional scenes that take place after the "Canonical" ending, one for finding all of the in-game Ads (which alludes to The Man Behind the Man) and one for achieving every other ending (which acts as a Sequel Hook).
• Story Difficulty Setting: The game has three "difficulty" modes: Relaxed, which focuses more on the Point & Click elements and allows the player to skip mandatory fights; Standard, which strikes a balance between the two gameplay styles; and Hardcore, which focuses more on the Beat 'Em Up elements. With this post on twitter, there's an upcoming Harder Than Hard difficulty called "Mania" as well.
• Take Your Time: Barring certain circumstances, Brok and Graff can put off their current main tasks indefinitely to play Trasher Hunt or fight in the Virtual Arena for Unis and/or (only) XP, in Graff's case.
• Taking You with Me: After the robotic Wes' evil is revealed and following the boss fights, the Director (Graff's robotic teacher and Klay's adoptive mother) arrives to pin him down and stop him from escaping. When Wes states that he'll never change his ways and will keep enacting his genocidal plans no matter what, she ultimately decides to explode and take them both out.
• Temporal Paradox: One Non-Standard Game Over involves Brok using information gained later in the game (or just guessing the correct passcode from the information available) to enter Shay's garage when it's locked, causing a "Premature Ending" when he sees her working on a device that won't be complete until the passcode is supposed to be obtained. Another occurs in one of the endings, where Brok reads Shay's diary instead of using her device, deciding to spend their last moments together before a paradox wipes them out.
• They Died Because of You: After getting into trouble during his investigation, Brok is questioned by Wes about his involvement with Sin while hooked up to a lie detector that connects directly to the subject's mind, before the questions suddenly switch to whether Brok has ever murdered anyone and if he's responsible for the death of his wife. Brok confronts Wes afterwards, who admits that they didn't have this technology back in the day and he had blamed Brok for the accident, morally if not directly, but couldn't officially prove or deny it until now.
• Timed Mission: On Day 5, Graff and his peers are told that they'll have an hour to take the final trial to graduate from Slumers to Drumers, with an actual hour-long timer appearing on screen.
  • Another earlier example is that whether or not Brok makes it to the science fair in time depends on if he completes a section of the game in under 15 minutes in real time. Unlike Graff, however, there's no visible timer.
• Time Machine: Shay's been working on creating one of these, and completes it on the Final Day. Depending on the ending, either Graff or Brok can attempt to use it to change history.
• Top-Heavy Guy: The art style depicts everyone with relatively short legs as seen in concept art reference sheets. Dart and R.J. are more traditional examples, and arguably the Squealers Chief.
• Unexplained Accent: Sin and Dee's unnamed daughter speaks with an Australian accent, despite her parents clearly having American ones (though, to be fair, they ARE animals that are native to Australia, being a Kangaroo and a Dingo repsectively.).
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Near the endgame path leading to most endings, Brok and Sin's wife Dee Silver are about to hand some important information to commissioner Wes, but Brok's investigative instinct makes him realize some inconsistences in Wes' behavior; if the following interrogation sequence is successful, Brok realizes that Wes was a victim of this after a car accident five years ago.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Brok can lend a hand to people who aren't related to the main case he's working on, like providing medicine to a homeless ex-soldier outside the apartment where he and Graff lives or helping a depressed, recently-fired robot postman get a new job.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Since Brok and Graff can use their brawns to get past a roadblock, there's nothing to stop a player from making them punch friendly/neutral characters for no reasons. They will rightfully call the two out on their violent behavior.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: NPCs will react accordingly if Brok or Graff persists in their wanton act of violence. There's an example at the beginning at Brok's apartment where Graff will eventually snap, screams that he hates Brok, and then retreat to his bedroom if the alligator doesn't quit attacking him unprovoked. This will even cause their Relationship Values to take a nosedive.
  • Hitting some people unprovoked can cause the player to end up in a fight to the death with them. If that happens, the battle will end poorly no matter who wins. One example takes place in the early part of Chapter 1 where Brok can get into a Boss Fight with Sin before exposing him for his crime. Killing him or getting killed by him at that point will net the player a Game Over.
  • Other people if you hit them will either arrest you, or try to kill you. For example if you hit Bolt after you give him to Shay, you die. Hit the Director or the Rat Guard? You get arrested. Hit Dee? She’ll hit you back. Hit Dr. Mink? He will call for the Rat Guard to kill you. And etc.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Despite being one of Brok's most important allies early in the game, Shay sequesters herself in her garage around Day 4 in order to work on an invention and isn't seen again. This turns out to be intentional, as her existence is dependent on a Stable Time Loop and the one game over and non-canonical ending where she is seen again cause reality to break down due to a Temporal Paradox.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: When being given a lie detection test by the police, Brok can claim he's never murdered anyone, which sets it off to his own confusion. He then asks if beating up a robot to the point that it breaks down counts as murder, as he's had to do so a few times during his investigation.
• World of Funny Animals: Every character in the game is either an animal person or a robot, such as Brok the gator and Graff the cat. Interestingly, some characters like Brok and Sin are Barefoot Cartoon Animal, while others such as Graff and Shay are Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal who wears shoes and boots respectively. A conversation Brok can have with a blind Tribot at the Police Station has the latter states that footwear doesn't affect the scanning process, suggesting that it's an optional fashion choice.
• You Are in Command Now: In one potential segment of the Modular Epilogue, Ott, a teenager, asks R.J., an officer who got fired during the main story, to help him run the Slumers police department after Ott's uncle Wes and the Tribots that were running it are all taken out of commission.
• You Dirty Rat!: With the exception of the rat security guard in Chapter 4, who tries his best to live a life on the straight and narrow despite facing the occasional Fantastic Racism, most rodents, or Squealers as they are known in-universe, are shady characters who makes a living carrying out criminal activities that Brok/Graff can end up fighting. Turns out they weren't always the bad guys though, as they revolted against the Atlasian government years ago due to unfair treatment, with Brok being partially responsible for their banishment.