About half way into Pants Quest, the hero collapses onto the floor in despair: nothing is going well. His pants have suddenly disappeared into the ether, he somehow doesn’t have an extra pair, and he has also misplaced his keys to the basement, where he’ll need to head to in order to retrieve a particular item. His day has already descended into an odious cesspit of pure mi🙈sery—and he can’t believe the day has only just begun.
That’s the essence of Pants Quest, a point-and-click adventure game about a fully-grown, adult man who still lives his life as if he’s a young bachelor in a fraternity house. He has woken up during the early morning in the midst of a heavy downpour to head to work, which is, to be fair, arguably one of the worst conditions to drag yourself out of bed. His boxers, t-shirts, and socks are strewn across the room, his old clothes are bundled into a pile and chucked into an empty cabinet, and his kitchen probably stinks from days-old pizza, coffee, and chips. And, of course, he can’t find his only pair of pants. The one thing he can do is to cheerily declare, “I guess we’re going on a pants quest!” to you. Youꦕ. Because you’re going to find his pants for him.
As with most point-and-click games, you begin by examining everything in the house, and lumping items haphazardly together in hopes that something, somehow, will click. To fans of the genre, the game will already seem largely familiar: your means of interaction with the environment incl🧜ude Look, Use, Pick up, Open/Close, and a keen eye for scouring through the rooms’ pixelated mess. But rather than just focusing on finding the dude’s missing pants, you’ll also need to tick off a couple of items on his to-do list: coffee, breakfast, feeding your cat, and checking your emails. Completing these tasks is akin to working a series of puzzles, and they aren’t particularly difficult or illogical—most of them can be solved by just tinkering around the environments and objects.
This process, too, also feels much less tedious due to the game’s self-deprecating humour, as well as the numerous hiccups that get in the way of your tasks. Pants Quest encapsulates Murphy’s Law to a te🀅e, a🙈nd it’s not hard to feel somewhat sympathetic for the guy whose quest for pants has gone horribly wrong in such a colourful myriad of ways.
In one particularly hilarious instance, you’ll need to figure out how to use the washing machine—something you would think most people know how to do—but the cursed contraption was so incredibly arcane and ludicrously designed that I couldn’t help but groan in a mix of disbelief and amusement. There’s really no way to figure out how to use this on your own, aside from hunting for a piece of written ins꧋truction that his ไwife has conveniently hidden somewhere in their home. Adding insult to the protagonist’s injury is the conclusion to Pants Quest, with the fates adding a final twist to the dude’s unfortunate circumstances that’s quite frankly impossible not to chuckle at.
While there are some moment-to-moment frustrations with the game—an issue I chalk up to the lead’s ineptitude to clean up after himself, as well as his sheer laziness—Pants Quest is still a pretty entertaining and charming distraction that you should be able to finish in an afternoon. Even if🧸 it doesn’t break the mould for the genre (nor does it seem to want to, anyway) its short length makes the game extremely digestible. Definitely more than that day-old pizza.