It’s hard to pinpoint when I became middle-aged, but I’m pretty sure it was the moment I watched and enjoyed The Detectorists. On the surface, it’s a fairly twee tale about a pair of friends who love the bond their love of metal detecting gives them, but look deeper and you’ll find a treasure trove of human emotion and life. I’m hoping that’s what Morgan: Metal Detective will offer. The Steam Next Fest demo, available now, is a little short, but there’s promise here.
I won’t lie. Morgan: Metal Detective wasn’t what I jumped into the Steam Next Fest listings to find. I was looking for a racing game of some sort, ideally with a proper arcade slant. Who wouldn’t want to discover the next Ridge Racer first thing on a Monday morning? Well, I didn’t find that, but I did stumble across this. The demo is brief in the extreme, clocking in at no more than 15 minutes, and the pace is as far from breakneck as you could go without completely standing still. But there’s a flicker of something here to fill that cosy escapism itch you might need scratching now and again.
In it, titular heroine Morgan takes a boat to the island her late grandfather lived on. Her mother gives her his old metal detector, and that starts a quaint adventure to help the islanders find lost items and discover more about said granddad. So far, with one piece of detecting completed, Morgan’s more of a solo flyer than Andy and Lance in the aforementioned BBC show (watch it on iPlayer, it’s great, I promise), but this gives her the opportunity to listen to tapes her granddad recorded, which is as lovely as it sounds, as well as collections of music.
Gameplay, if you’re looking for it in a game like this, is simple. Scan the ground with your metal detector and dig if you get a signal. Sometimes you’ll find trash, but hopefully you’ll also find the missing items the village folk have mislaid. Other inhabitants of the island will pop up and offer help if they know anything of importance, but you better get used to digging up ring pulls and bottle tops.
An instant camera (how very 90s!) lets you snap your favourite island views, while that rubbish you dig up can be traded in at a store to swap for new film. A journal tracks your progress, but it can be decorated with stickers and your photos, giving you a better sense of actually being on the island and documenting your time there.
How Morgan: Metal Detective’s broader, central mystery about the island itself pans out, I don’t know. The demo didn’t do anything to suggest what this is, let alone how deep it runs, but I suspect it’ll be tied to granddad in a way that tugs on your heartstrings. Voice acting is surprisingly decent for a small game like this (Morgan is voiced by the BAFTA-nominated Charlotte McBurney, for example, who voiced Amicia in the A Plague Tale series), so there’s definitely the talent here to pull something quite nuanced and emotional together if the script is up to it.
As Steam Next Fest demos go, Morgan: Metal Detective isn’t the most content rich and currently feels a tad clunky with some less than ideal camera movement when playing with a mouse, but if it eventually lets me live out my metal detecting dreams without actually having to get cold and wet in the outside world, I’ll be about as happy as when Andy and Lance find the big one.