When I saw the first trailer for The Magnificent Trufflepigs, a quaint looking metal detecting sim written by Andrew Crawshaw who penned the superb Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. I knew it was a game I wanted to play.
Published by the gaming arm AMC of Walking Dead and Mad Men fame, and with marketing that made it look like the gaming equivalent of The Detectorists. I was more than a little bit excited when I uncovered the review code in my inbox.
Unfortunately though, the idyllic trappings, and easy going, but surprisingly compelling gameplay is marred by a cast of characters that can best be described as unrelatable, and at worst a couple of entitled night hawks with no real problems.
Players take on the role of Alex, a poor sap whose been press ganged into spending a week helping his old friend, and ex-girlfriend, Beth relive their childhood, and metal detecting glory days, by finding a lost earing.
The set up is a simple one, every day Adam is sent to a new field on the farm with Beth’s trusty metal detector to scan the ground in hopes of uncovering some treasure. It’s a simple case of waiting for the meter to go mental, and then follow it to its source, while taking in the stunning Yorkshire dales.
The core gameplay loop is incredibly sedate, yet, surprisingly compelling. Hearing the ever more immediate beeping of the detector before feverishly digging at the ground in the hopes of uncovering something exciting never got old, even if 99 per cent of the stuff Alex uncovers is junk.
The problem is Beth is awful, and Adam isn’t much better. There’s nothing some admittedly great performances from Luci Fish and Arthur Darvill (Aka Rory from Dr Who) can do to save that.
The story is told in a similar manner to Campo Santo’s Firewatch, with the games two leads conversing with each other via walkie talkie for the whole of the game’s four hour run time.
Darvill’s Adam is probably the most patient man on earth, if a little condescending at times. As you dig up each new bottle cap, rusted toy car, or suspicious piece of costume jewelry, the radio will crackle and Beth, brought to life by Fish’s lilting Yorkshire twang, will lumber Adam with her latest set of first world problems.
You see life for Beth is an absolute misery, Stuck in a relationship with a man who only spent £6,000 on an engagement ring for her, in a job at the top of a family-owned company she can never be fired from, (Even though she bloody well should be), Beth is distraught as she doesn’t know whether a well-paid job, marriage, and a comfortable life are what she really wants.
As the game progresses it becomes abundantly clear that all of Beth’s troubles are of her own creation. She’s spoilt, unempathetic, and a complete arsehole to Adam, who has taken a week off and travelled from God knows where just to help her out.
By the end of it, you can’t help but feel sorry for Adam as he’s basically been drafted in as a sounding board for all of Beth’s self-inflicted problems, while she constantly reminds him that no one in her family or social group likes the poor sod.
However, there is a lingering feeling that Adam may not actually exist, and simply be Beth’s imaginary friend. A way for her coping with the stresses of being a middle-class twit, hurtling towards an early mid-life crisis.
If this is the case, the narrative takes on a little more intrigue, but either way its tough to recommend Truffle Pigs, over say, spending the weekend watching The Detectorists again, or just going for an actual walk in the country, and getting a nice pub lunch afterwards.
Unless, of course, you’re desperately looking for the gaming equivalent of a weekend stuck in a crumbling farmhouse with a self-obsessed bell end that spends the whole time telling you, how unwelcome you are and how awful it is that they have the money and job security to just fuck off travelling to ‘find themselves’.