(In 2014 I briefly wrote for RETRO Magazine at wwwreadRetro.com. This is one of my few reviews.)

I opened up my inventory, clicked on a bottle of booze, and then clicked on a dog in the scene. “Clearly Bik is in good hands for this adventure” was the message displayed. At that early moment I was sure Bik was going to be a pretty good game.

Many of us fondly remember the heyday of PC adventure games. Studios like LucasArts and Sierra brought us worlds to interact with, characters to love, and hamsters to microwave. Bik from Zotnip Games takes a lesson from these old gems and lets us point-and-click our way through a sci-fi adventure where you feed “chemically enhanced” brownies to a gigantic crab monster. Yeah, it's that kind of game.

Bik has a good sense of humor and is tonally light-hearted, which is something that's par for the course for a good amount of old point-and-click adventures (like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream...oh, wait...). The overall narrative here isn't particularly impressive and tells the tale mostly of how a bad race of aliens is bad. The banter between characters and the general flavor text when using items, however, is gold. I never cared that the story wasn't particularly deep.

In Bik you play as any number of characters, including a boy named Bik. Unlike some modern adventure titles like Gemini Rue and Broken Age, you can't swap between them on the fly. Certain sections of the game are designated either for Bik or his alien friends. There's no difference other than some inventory items such as Bik's sentient, megalomaniacal “GameTron” handheld console. GameTron is awesome.

Like purebred dogs, adventure games often suffer from the same ailments. Slow moving protagonists, backtracking, pixel hunting, and confusing puzzles that are more about what the designer was thinking rather than what actually makes sense. Bik solves some of these issues, with my personal favorite being a fast forward mechanic. Hold shift and everything from cutscenes to in-game walking and interaction are sped up. We've grown impatient over the years, and being able to speed things up is always welcomed.

There's an eyeball icon in the top left of your screen that will highlight items that can be interacted. No more pixel hunting. There is virtually no backtracking, and Bik knows exactly when to take the controls away from you. For example, if you're in the engine room of the ship and complete all of the puzzles the story will take over. You will be faded out and on to the bridge instead of having to walk there yourself. These instances were all filler scenes, and I was so glad to have them streamlined in this way. This is an example of game shortening for the better, as there's no chance you'll get lost on the way to the bridge to trigger the next scene.

Occasionally you'll face a scene in which you can die. Thankfully, your game will be saved automatically before any of these. This means that you're free to experiment as much as you want and you most certainly will want to, as some of the best lines in the game come from willingly igniting a plasma grenade in your own face.

For everything Bik does well it still can't break the chains of an age old adventure game problem. The puzzles in Bik, while not particularly difficult, often don't make sense until you complete them. I know the farming robot needs a power cell, but why? What does this farming robot have to do with my quest? I jammed a new power core into the farming robot and it sputtered to life. Suddenly, it went off the rails and slammed into another thing, starting a chain reaction that allowed me to continue. This can lead to some issues found in virtually every point-and-click adventure in existence, namely the “what was the designer thinking?” issue.

If you've played some older adventure games in the past Bik will look familiar. It looks like it's from the 1980's complete with rudimentary sprites and limited animation. The cutscenes in the game don't conform to this, as they actually use a simplified 3D which can actually be pretty charming. Issues arise when the game is so visually limited that the floor looks like the ceiling, the ceiling looks like the wall, and the wall looks like the floor. Your perspective can be thrown off in a big way, depending on where you are and what you think you should be doing. There was one sequence that I was stuck on simply because I thought the floor ended and became a wall. That wasn't the case.

Bik sounds like an old PC game in all ways but its music, which can be summed up solely with the word “chill.” Things rarely sound very urgent and it feels more like laid back saunter through space rather than a world-saving event. While there was a mismatch in story and music I still really enjoyed the score. Adventure games are rarely twitchy, and often give you infinite time to stare stare the screen, click everything in sight, and figure out the puzzles. In this respect, the music did a good job.

On that note, you don't always have forever. A few puzzles (at the end of the game, mostly) require you to do something quickly before you're vaporized or eaten by a huge crab monster. These sequences were a little irritating, as I wasn't able to properly discern the playing field due to the visual problems stated earlier. While the checkpoints are very generous it was still frustrating to die thirty times in a row because you didn't understand what was expected of you. Still, these areas were few and only at the end of the game.

Bik is a good point-and-click adventure game that will be much better appreciated in the hands of a veteran who remembers the good ol' days. It does enough by fixing the issues left by decades of point-and-click games that it can be enjoyed by most, but it could still use some polishing in a few areas. For people new to the genre or those who aren't particularly interested I can't recommend Bik over something like Broken Age or some older LucasArts games. If you like the genre and are looking for a quick, charming, fun, and quirky journey through funky space you'd do well to play Bik. Lay off the brownies, though. They might just kill you.