Hector: Episode 1—We Negotiate With Terrorists is raunchy fun

There’s a hostage situation rapidly going south, you run a police force of questionable training and intelligence, and find yourself at the mercy of a homicidally polite sniper. What do you do? Well, if you’re the head honcho of the Clapper’s Wreake police force (the town that took the “Great” out of Britain), you might call in your best officers to handle the delicate negotiations. Once that failed and you found the body count rising exponentially, it might then occur to you to send in the worst of the worst—someone like Detective Inspector Hector, known to his fellow officers as the “fat arse of the law.”

Originally released on iPhone, the Hector: Badge of Carnage series developed by Straandlooper Animation and published by Telltale Games has been redesigned for the larger screens of PCs, Macs, and the iPad.  The series’ first installment, Hector: Episode 1—We Negotiate With Terrorists, is being released today and offers players the chance to explore the gritty life of a cop out to save a bunch of hostages… or perhaps not. It turns out that the game’s titular hero, Hector, is more interested in booze, sex, and a good curry than doing anything approaching real police work.

We Negotiate With Terrorists follows our perturbed hero Hector as he digs around in the game’s point-and-click world for helpful items while snarking his way through the case. Pick the wrong thing, and you’re treated to a healthy dose of British obscenity centering around how stupid that choice was. Mind you, if you pick the right thing, you’ll probably still get a healthy dose of British obscenity anyway. Hector has a certain… gift… for language, as we see from his description of the town this tale is set in:

“Clappers Wreake is an undigested morsel of prison-grade turkey twizzler on the great steaming turd of the Midlands, floating turgidly in the Royal Cistern of Britain.”

That’s a polite excerpt compared to some of the other things you’ll hear. Hector’s world is a mishmash of hoopty rides, ugly prostitutes, stupidity, condoms, scatological references, text-speak teens, and other things along those lines.  You’ll find the dialog runs the gamut from cheesy pun groaners to stingingly acerbic smack-downs, and in several places had me laughing out loud, and not just in text-speak.

The graphics in We Negotiate With Terrorists are 2D and cartoony. With that said, the style fits well with this raunchy little point-and-click comedy puzzle adventure. Rather than using graphics as a shiny distraction, the graphics in We Negotiate With Terrorists give you something fun to look at—and occasionally be glad of the low detail—while the story careens along like some psychotic noir detective tale that hovers in the same piss-stained neighborhood of PG porn.

If you really enjoy puzzles but hate having to go to the internet when you get stuck, then you’ll be glad to hear that We Negotiate With Terrorists has been improved from the early iPhone version through the addition of a robust hint system. First, you can talk to your partner, Lambert, for slightly less-obvious hints through normal dialog as you could in the iPhone version. If you’re still stuck, there’s a side menu under the question mark that offers two additional levels of clue-by-four: much more obvious hints and “just tell me already.”

Really, if I have one criticism of the game at all, it would be that it feels a bit short—even for a clicky puzzle adventure. I managed to complete the entire game in a little less than four hours, and that included taking a couple of breaks in the middle. This may be because the game is a port from the iPhone version, and thus the developers had to create a smaller adventure for the mobile platform. The good news is that Telltale Games has added in a free copy of Puzzle Agent when you pick up We Negotiate With Terrorists. Furthermore the company is donating 10% of each purchase to ongoing relief efforts in Japan. Purchase of the game also grants you access to a special forum, but since forums can be a mixed bag, you’ll have to decide if that’s something you’d consider a selling point or not.

If the above has piqued your curiosity, you can check out the launch trailer for Hector: Episode 1—We Negotiate With Terrorists below. While it’s not really explicit, having to explain to your boss why they saw a grumpy cartoon guy on a pastel pink cock-shaped rug might be something you wish to avoid. As such, be warned it’s not safe for work—much like the clicky adventure game it represents.