Playing With The Big Boys – Demo Thoughts

I spent some time with the demo for point & click adventure game Playing With The Big Boys from Orange Plate Games and came away more impressed than I expected to, which is slightly awkward given that the Kickstarter didn’t hit its goal. Because honestly, this feels like something that deserves to exist.

This is a 2D point-and-click adventure with a heavy focus on atmosphere and storytelling, the sort of game that clearly wants you to poke around, soak things in, and think about what it’s actually saying rather than just solving puzzles and moving on. You play as Jack, a character stuck in a world run by people bigger, meaner, and more powerful than him, and the game leans hard into themes of control, freedom, and how those things are often a bit of a lie.

One thing I really liked was the sense of space. The environment is big, not just wide but tall too. You are moving up and down, and it gives the world a sense of scale that a lot of point and click games struggle with. It feels like a place rather than a backdrop, and it actively encourages you to explore rather than funnelling you along a single obvious path.

Now, it is absolutely rough around the edges, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Hotspots sometimes hang around after an object has vanished, which is distracting. There are also moments where Jack happily strolls through things that should very clearly block him, carts, people, the usual suspects. But this is a demo, and these are exactly the kinds of things you expect to be tidied up later, so none of it felt like a dealbreaker.

In a game with this much screen real estate and detail, it feels like a hotspot finder could have been useful. Pixel hunting is not nostalgia, it’s just friction, and a simple toggle would go a long way here.

Narratively, the demo does a solid job of setting the tone. This isn’t really a story about escaping somewhere, it’s about Power, who has it, who wants it, and who gets crushed by it, and it sits at the heart of everything. It’s bleak without being melodramatic.

Across the game there are loads of characters walking past you, huddling in conversation or just hanging out on a bench, but we can only interact with a small amount of these. It would have been cool to be able to stop and chat to everyone, but maybe that's just me wanting to be fully emersed in the time of 1902.

Despite the failed Kickstarter, I genuinely hope Playing With The Big Boys finds a way to move forward. There’s something quietly confident about it, even in this unfinished state. With some polish, a bit more mechanical clarity, and a few quality of life tweaks, this could turn into a really interesting modern point and click adventure.

It would be a shame if this ended up as just a “what could have been”.

Watch me play the demo in full here!

Wishlist and play the demo

• Steam page