MILKMAID OF THE MILKY WAY
I’m sure I’ve mentioned that my husband’s side of the family is Bulgarian. As such, my offspring engage in various traditions on New Year’s Day, like wishing people’s apple trees an abundance of red fruit, not green, and hoping they won’t die during the following year. They also tap their Baba (grandma) with tinsel-covered sticks to exchange their youthfulness for her cash, usually a generous $20 each. Milkmaid of the Milky Way is an adventure game my kids really connected with and, if you play it, you’ll come to appreciate that youth is something to keep for yourself.
The opening of the game is pastoral and lovely, like when you’re feeding Hen Wen in The Black Cauldron, but peace is fleeting. You’ll make the most delicious-sounding butter, have a brief, possibly suggestive, conversation with the guy who takes your wares to market and are then forced to board a bronze spacecraft in pursuit of your cows. I didn’t really want to mention this, because aliens are always a nice surprise, but to cast this a dairy farming sim would be inaccurate. The bulk of the game happens after abduction.
This brings me to my only real criticism, which is that the artwork was so beautiful, gentle and green in the opening that I wanted to stay on the girl’s solitary clifftop farm, perched above a fjord, for the entire game. The spaceship certainly has interesting features, but it is functionally drawn and garish, in places. It does, however, have around twenty rooms, people to talk to and puzzles to solve. My kids particularly liked a pair of old ladies who made jokes about their droopy breasts. They’ve been copying the giggle animation ever since.
Probably the most useful thing I can say about puzzling is that I played this with my kids over three nights and they spent the days bugging me with theories on how to use items. Can we throw a ball up the zero G elevator? Where can we find a ball? Will the cows be OK? Do the cows have a ball? This is the first time I remember this happening with my kids, although I certainly had this relationship with my dad for my entire childhood. Everything was solvable, but we sometimes needed some time away before the penny would drop.
After playing Stair Quest, I noticed how quickly this character moved. It may seem a strange observation, but it allowed us to quickly test puzzle theories, without feeling that tedious sense of “walking around.” Amazingly, everything rhymes, sometimes not quite perfectly, but it lends the tale a folksy feel, even when you’re orbiting the Earth. There’s certainly a sense of ancientness to the inhabitants of the spaceship and their way of life combines technology, mysticism and pastoralism. Things have just gone a bit wrong for them, that’s all.
Milkmaid of the Milky Way is probably three hours long, being nicely paced for a play with the family. It combines weightier themes with light-hearted banter and the puzzles make plenty of sense. Delivering precisely what is expected from a classic point and click adventure, I also got a nostalgic feeling of shared experience with my kids. Of course, I wouldn’t try to re-live my childhood through them. Or would I? My childhood was full of games. And staircases. I wonder if I can get them to hit me with the tinsel stick next year.
everything rhymes, and it lends the tale a folksy feel, even when you’re orbiting the Earth