The year is still relative young and so far there are hardly any new games on the shelves. But more or less clandestine some considerable freeware adventures are released, such as 'The Legend of Mardaram', the astounding professional 'Captain Delta und die Quelle von Argos' or 'Frasse and the Peas of Kejick'. Frasse was made by the Swedish developer Trumgottist or Rikard Peterson. It persuades by the fact that it's free and equipped with such cute graphics.

Graphics

Times have gone, when it took you days to download a game from the net with a rampantly cheeping modem, then the game shapes up in strange pixel graphics, so that even hard-boiled adventure gamers may doubt about its playability. If such games are not too extensive, today a download lasts not more than a few minutes most of the time with the right connection and the games look often really great. The graphics of 'Frasse and the Peas of Kejick' are perhaps not as professionell as in commercial games, as they are made of simple pictures with quite little character animation. But instead the game attracted me from the first minute because of its really cute presentation, so that I must hold my horses, not to lapse into teen language of Bravo- (German teenage magazine) reading girls, using permanently words such as charming, sweet, twee and cute. But these adjectives probably describe the graphics style best. For example if you watch Frasse himself, hopping up and down in front of a tree, as well as his no less cute friend Gurra, even if I don't know with the best will, what this two 'dangerous' monsters do embody at all. I would speculate that Frasse might be something like raspberry meets Sonic, but let's simply drop all presumptions: Frasse is Frasse and Gurra is Gurra.

Story

'Frasse and the Peas of Kejick' is a fairy tale adventure, but none of epoch-making dimensions. So the story is told in a few sentences. Frasse is going to visit his friend Gurra, when he finds a note on the way. It says that the king ordered to search for the mentioned Peas of Kejick - a reward is promised. If that isn't a chance for a nice adventure, Frasse thinks by himself and wants to sally out to the island of Kejick immediately. However the quest can't start without his friend, whom he must free as quick as possible. The search doesn't run that smoothly and so he has to spar with an evil sorcerer e.g. and a dragon either, who perhaps isn't just as bad as his reputation?

Puzzles

Another plus is the puzzle design. In this game we can exchange the roles and slip into another character. Sometimes we can only get ahead with Frasse, another time we absolutely need Gurra in order to solve a puzzle, since both have different skills. Gurra for instance is better in handling words and has strong legs. Unfortunately the poor guy has no arms! If these are needed, Frasse must act. He also possesses, contrary to Gurra, an inventory.

And so we collect many items and use them, but there are different puzzles too. A boat must be assembled and a crate has to be dragged from one scene to the next, in order to use it there. It's too big to fit our inventory. I liked this funny, imaginative design very much.

Later in the game there is also a labyrinth-like cave, but here it depends less on memorizing the correct path. Instead one must relocate the matching rooms on the basis of colors and "besides" solve some other puzzles, e.g. open locked doors, crack a code or operate a transceiver unit. The degree of difficulty is rising a bit and from the cave system on, the player has to think harder to fathom the mysteries. How nice and friendly, when suddenly Rikard Peterson appears in a German-language forum, to provide active help.

Handling

The controls were nearly optimal for a comic-style adventure game of this kind. Frasse is a point&click adventure game and both, the operating mode and the shape of the cursor, were adopted from Monkey Island 3. If you click with the left mouse button at a hotspot, the cursor transforms and you can select directly between the three functions: eye (look at), hand or foot (use, climb, also kick etc.) and mouth (talk but also eat). A bit confusing is the fact that one can either proceed through texts with the right mouse button on the one hand and on the other hand open the inventory, so that I mixed it up occasionally. But there are major sins, a developer could do to controls. I'm thinking especially of a lot of twisted keyboard controls.

But something must be criticized however. From time to time the texts remain on the screen. This can be corrected easily, by leaving and entering the scene again. Then a text vanishes by itself.

Sound

There is no voice acting as in many fangames yet. But the sub-title-speed can be adjusted and on the lowest level the text only disappears after an extra click. And so Teutons, that often are at daggers drawn with the English language, have all time in the world, to read the short and easy English dialogues and comments.

The music is varied. There are most different tracks to listen to, from electronic to slightly classical themes. There are hardly no soundeffects or background noises.

Result

The internet is the platform, where innovative and alternative developers can call attention to their skills and work with free adventure games. Rikard Peterson of Trumgottist is one of them and Frasse shows already very well his mastery. The game has simple graphics, but is a solid and very appealing comic-style adventure. It's really cute and lives on its very own humor and imaginative graphic style, which reminds a little of illustrations from kids books.

The puzzles, mostly within moderate difficulty, are pleasing likewise. And that's why Frasse is a fine substitute, until the commercial market offers new releases. It's not easy to rate such simple, more or less single-handed produced game in comparison with commercial adventures - therefore 72 % as "Free-download-adventure-with-sympathy-factor-rating".

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