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Something is amiss in the dingy town of Slagford, and curious scamp Pip Bunting is the only one who can find out what. So quit your mithering, it’s time to discover just how grim it truly is up north.
A Pocket Full of Slagford is an upcoming retro-styled 3D puzzle adventure game set in a surreal alternative-reality near-future northern England that never escaped the clutches of Thatcherism. The story follows the misadventures of a young local lad from the eponymous Slagford after he takes ownership of a mysterious relic that lets him wreak havoc on reality.
It’s the passion project of Australia-born, New Zealand-based artist Patrick Grant, who formed solo-developer studio Slumps to create a game inspired by the point-and-click classics from the late 80s and early 90s, such as LucasArts’ catalogue and Grim Fandango.
“They’re just a great format for narrative-heavy games, like an interactive story,” says Grant. “I like designing puzzles as well, so I always wanted to make a point-and-click. But from playing a lot, I know how samey they can be. From the start I was thinking about what I could do differently.”
The result of Grant’s prototyping is what he describes as a “jigsaw sticker book kind of thing.” As you navigate the nasty industrial hellscape, you collect imprints of the game’s scenery. If, along the way, you spot a place where these imprints align, you can paste them into the world to solve puzzles. Grant is also committed to evoking the oft-forgotten CD-Rom era of the late ’90s, complete with looping CG-rendered backgrounds and janky 3D models with far too many sharp edges.
Yet he’s keen to emphasise that his main focus is the narrative. While the trailer and Steam store page feature a fair few Yorkshire-isms, A Pocket Full of Slagford’s story and dialogue take inspiration from various aspects of northern English culture, despite Grant admitting to having never actually spent any real time in the area.
“In the colonies we get a lot of BBC English programming,” he explains. “So when I was growing up there was so much British telly that I’d be watching. There’s this BBC miniseries from the 80s called Boys from the Blackstuff, about this group of scousers getting up to mischief, set in the Thatcher years, just trying to make ends meet. It’s incredibly well written – this mix of sad and funny – against that whole big economic collapse. I got interested in that, reading about the Thatcher years.”
That interest is what inspired A Pocket Full of Slagford’s bleak setting. While Grant says he wasn’t trying to make a political point when he went into the project, he’s not shying away from the issues of the time: “Because of that working-class setting, you end up naturally touching on points like the wealth disparity, which I show in the game, and the class conflict. Specifically, from watching stuff like Boys from the Blackstuff, or Billy Elliot, I was interested in the infighting that goes on within these classes.”
Despite touching on these themes, Grant stresses that he’s going for a comedic, surrealist angle. As he puts it: “I was like, what if I set it in the future and, instead of coal, they’re mining shit out of the ground?” He may not be trying to make a political statement about Thatcherism, but some might say he has hit on an apt analogy.
