Cantaloupe Chronicle review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Search for scoops gets enough right to make for a relaxed mix of journalism and small-town adventuring

When I was young, I typed up my own newspaper about neighborhood events – some completely made up – arranging the articles in columns, leaving room for sucky drawings instead of photographs. I’ve always loved writing, and I always thought that if I didn’t succeed in becoming a novelist, I’d definitely become a journalist. Well, I guess in some way, that dream has finally come true, just not exactly how I intended.

In Cantaloupe Chronicle, you play as Fanny Turner, a young wannabe reporter who spends a week in a Midwestern small American town looking for interesting stories to cover in the titular local newspaper. While the graphics and clunky user interface won’t be to everyone’s taste, and the search for inventory items could have been simplified, the fun dialogues and the option to add your own words to your articles make this a very laid-back and fairly enjoyable experience.

The game actually starts after the fact, with Fanny writing about her experiences as an intern at the news company owned by her Aunt Jill. Immediately she quotes her aunt, who says that you can’t always find the answers you’re looking for, spoiling that Cantaloupe Chronicle is more about the journey than the destination, as the saying goes, which one of the characters here even mentions specifically.

During your stay in Cantaloupe, you sleep at Aunt Jill’s house. Each morning you wake up, go to the paper’s offices and ask for your next assignment, for five consecutive days. This third-person experience is completely mouse controlled, with the arrow cursor changing into a magnifying glass when you can examine something, a hand when you can take or manipulate it, a text balloon when you hover over a character you can talk to, and an exit sign on doors.

As you explore the town, you will notice many hotspots that can be examined, but rarely will one have actual importance to your current quest. At least at the start – a random box of holiday decorations standing in a corner somewhere might suddenly become very interesting after a new task has popped up later on.

The sign at the edge of town shows a population of only 12, but there are more people than that roaming around the distinct separate districts of Cantaloupe and its surrounding regions. However, you can only interact with some of them as you explore such locales as a cabin by a lake, the police department, a neighboring town, and a drive-in cinema (each becoming available for its related news story).

Next to your Aunt Jill and Uncle Clark, there’s Mortimer, the veteran reporter of the newspaper, who gives you most of the advice on how to arrange your articles. Amanda works the counter at the gas station with its own store. Her mother Beth lives in a wooden house near the edge of town, and her grandfather, former ranger Herb, has a cabin by the lake. There’s a burger joint with a clerk and a chef, and the town hall with the mayor’s secretary. The Wild West-themed part of town has a saloon owner, a food stand proprietor, a gift shop clerk and an old prospector entertaining the tourists. Finally, the police station has a receptionist, and you might find Officer Keith Robertson hanging out in the parking lot for a smoke.

Even though it adds to the cozy atmosphere of the game, personally I’m not a fan of the graphical style. The backgrounds are pretty basic, and I had a feeling most of the attention to detail went into drawing the many automobiles either parked or driving around. The characters are low-poly 3D models, with only minor facial features.

The game isn’t voiced, except for the intro with Fanny reading her final article aloud, her honeyed voice making it disappointing that the dubbing stops there. Dialogue lines appear at the bottom of the screen with a far more appealing portrait of the characters than the 3D models themselves. There’s no auto-advance; instead you click through the dialogue manually at your own speed. The soothing soundtrack of solo guitars pulls you into the relaxed atmosphere – until you walk in the path of an oncoming car turning into the gas station and it honks at you, anyway. (No worries; you won’t get run over.)

Cantaloupe Chronicle features a handy notebook system to help you keep track of your goals. You can find your inventory there, as well as a list of all relevant characters, and it will alert you when a new dialogue option becomes available for one of them. When you open it up, either by clicking on the general notebook icon in the lower right corner, or on the individual colored tags for each section along the same side, it blocks quite a large part of the screen. A downside to the position of the notebook icon itself is that I unintentionally clicked it sometimes when I just wanted Fanny to move to the right.

While journalists normally write against a deadline, there’s no real sense of urgency here, but as a player you might get worked up a bit running back and forth everywhere looking for that one missing inventory item. At least you can make Fanny run by holding down the mouse button, but doing so can trigger a hotspot manipulation should your cursor happen to hover over one as the screen scrolls sideways.

Cantaloupe Chronicle

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Theme:	Photography, Journalism
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

When you go hunting for a news story – like the annual fishing contest and the visit of a silent movie star – you need to get several pieces of information: an opening, some background detail, the catch, an ending, and of course an accompanying photograph. The notebook automatically checks them off once you have acquired the corresponding info. But you will have to put in some extra leg work before Cantaloupe’s inhabitants will fully open up to you.

For each of the five stories you have to investigate, there will be one or more characters who want something before they’ll help you out. That’s where the inventory puzzles come in. For example, you will have to build a fishing rod, create a tasty and non-police-insulting alternative to doughnuts, organize a protest to keep the touristy Wild West part of town – complete with vintage outhouses, covered wagons and even an authentic historical train station – from being demolished, get the drive-in cinema working again, and try to sell your Uncle Clark’s latest invention to the Cantaloupe crowd.

You’ll need a variety of inventory items to accomplish these tasks, but these things can only be collected once you actually need them, and usually in a totally different place on the other side of town. I lost loads of time revisiting every location to see if anything new had popped up, which felt too much like an old-fashioned scavenger hunt. Usually, in hindsight, there was some logic behind it all, but at the same time not something intuitively worked out ahead of time. For instance, when you need a pot to boil water on the kitchen stove, for some reason you can’t find one in any of the cupboards, but instead you need to go to another kitchen and “borrow” a pot there. To me, such things always feel like artificially prolonging the game.

Whenever you select an object in your inventory, it becomes active by showing its thumbnail in the lower left corner, indicating that you can use it on another inventory item or a hotspot. But the inventory remains open, so I had to click it closed half the time to be able to see the right side of the scene again. Unfortunately, you can only try using an active inventory item once; if Fanny says you can’t use it where you intended, it vanishes back into your pocket, and you have to open your inventory again and select it once more if you want to try it somewhere else.

Once you have a camera, you can whip it out anytime you want for a first-person perspective. When there’s something interesting to photograph, it’ll be indicated by four black corners in the viewfinder. Once you have positioned your screen and zoomed in or out to align the view, the corners will glow green and you can take the shot. Sometimes there are multiple things you can photograph for a single story, and I was a bit disappointed that when compiling your article, you can’t choose which picture you want to use.

Once you’ve uncovered all there is to know about a particular story, it’s time to head back to the newspaper office and use the computer to open up an old word processor. The bulk of your piece will already be written, so you just have to paste in the paragraphs. But an article has a minimum length, and sometimes you’ll need to fill it with some custom text you can write yourself. I quite enjoyed this freedom to add something creative, and I always tried to include a couple of puns, or some passive-aggressive accusations towards the powers that be. It’s quite limited, though, since the articles also have a maximum length, so the true writers among you will have to tone it down somewhat.

The in-game computer has a save function, so you can save your article and leave the computer whenever you want. This is very handy if, for instance, you get tired of running around town, want to take a break and get started on the article based on the information you have gathered so far. Cantaloupe Chronicle itself features a manual save function as well as an automatic save on exit, which is always a welcome addition, even for a game that took me only four hours to finish.

Once you’re done and your word count fits, you can print out your article (in-game, not for real) and your Aunt Jill will either give her approval or send you back to the word processor for revision if, for example, you failed to include all the necessary parts of the article or inserted them out of order. Funnily enough, you could write a whole bunch of gibberish as custom text, and it would go right through. The next morning, the newspaper will be on Aunt Jill’s breakfast table and you can read your creation on the front page. The game even offers the option to share your work in the Steam community.

Cantaloupe Chronicle also has an overarching storyline in which you research a drowning in a nearby lake. But as our young reporter explains herself at the start of the game, you won’t ever be able to find out what happened for sure. This part is intentionally left open-ended, as the developer was inspired by The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, a story about a dead body that never gets resolved. Sometimes you will be able to ask people questions about this case as you’re going about researching your other news stories, and in the end you will even compile an article about your findings. This time you can’t simply paste in the information, but instead must turn the facts you discovered into a comprehensive story yourself, according to your own interpretation.

Final Verdict

For a game that promotes its innovative article-writing system, Cantaloupe Chronicle focuses more on character interaction and inventory puzzles like a traditional point-and-click adventure. It allows only a little freedom in the writing itself – except for the final article – but even with its limitations, I appreciated the chance to let my creative juices flow. Being a writer myself, I definitely had more fun trying to be a journalist than traipsing all over town exploring every location repeatedly to find elusive items that are only accessible after you’ve been given the task to find them. Thankfully the puzzles themselves are quite logical and fun to solve, and I never had to call the in-game hint line. Personally I would have appreciated the game better with voice acting and a more appealing visual style, but the relaxing atmosphere and the genuine small-town feel were cozy reasons to escape the real world’s unsettling news stories for a few hours of creating my own.

Johnny played Cantaloupe Chronicle on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.