Genre: Adventure
Developer: Telltale Games
Players: 1
Retail Price: $35 (as part of Tales of Monkey Island)
Availability: PC
I have to take a serious hit on my geek cred for not having played any Monkey Island game before. I had no idea who Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™ was, nor La Chuck, etc. So if that invalidates everything I’m going to say, so be it and I’m sorry. Know that I give this game five stars and take that how you please (and also remember it’s spelled ‘poseur’).
Now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you that not having played any Monkey Island game before, I am now totally into Monkey Island. We can dispense with much of the talk about what an adventure game is and how Telltale does them amazingly, because it’s been nearly a year since I first reviewed Sam and Max Episode 101 and since then I — and, by extension, you, dear reader — have become intimately familiar with Telltale and their modus operandi. Just like Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures have changed the formula a bit by replacing dialog trees with a focus on item interaction, though, Tales of Monkey Island mixes things up a bit by adding in the mechanic of item combination. That doesn’t mean combining the item in your inventory with the one on the wall: instead there are three spots on the side of your inventory, one for examining an object more closely and two joined by a plus sign that, when pressed, will either make a dull clunking sound and return them to your inventory or glow brightly and produce a new, guaranteed-to-help-you-on-your-way item.
Dialog trees make a welcome returns, though somewhat regrettably there are times when you’re given a choice of four things to say but the outcome is exactly the same, either because you’re paraphrased or Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™ is interrupted (sorry, but it’s so much fun to type ™). Also returning are some voice actors from the Sam and Max series; I’m no expert on their body of work, but I do know that the news reporter was also the mole.
This is a more mature Telltale, though. That doesn’t mean this is Monkey Island After Dark, but they’ve certainly honed their skills to produce a better looking, sleeker product. Camera angles are more dynamic, making it more aesthetically pleasing to play. The world as a whole seemed more fleshed out; whether that was because they were able to build upon the existing cannon (you might think that’s a typo but it’s not; it’s instead a pun masquerading as a typo) I’m still too woefully ignorant to say, but this felt less like a small chunk of the story and more like a sweeping, epic first act.
The general plot of Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is that you’re stranded on Flotsam Island, your escape not hindered by a lack of transportation but instead by the constant inward winds that bring sailors to the island’s shores but prevent them from leaving. I have a feeling (knowing nothing about the series or the future episodes) that you’ll be returning to the island once you escape (that’s not a spoiler, it’s the point of the game), as there were sections of the town you never really utilized. The map was nice, allowing you to travel from any key area to any other if you reached a gap between them, though you still see mini Guybrush running from point A to B, sometimes for a fairly long time and obscured by trees, so at times I’d wonder if the game had frozen.
Maybe I’m just a sissy boy when it comes to these games, but it felt like some of the puzzles were harder, or at least less obvious, which is what I remember from the brief snippets of playtime I had with LucasArts adventure games when I was younger. Luckily for me there’s a walkthrough on the Telltale site, though using it made me feel like a failure. Some puzzles seemed obvious once I knew the next step, and I think by the end I had broken the Loser Seal of admitting defeat and as such was more willing to say ‘Aaaah damn it, alt tab!’ Others, though, I consider less intuitive, including one where it would have been obvious had I done actions in the reverse order, which I think was less natural to do, therefore it’s not my fault and pfffbht.
In the course of three and a half hours, I went from not knowing a single thing about Monkey Island to being completely enraptured by it. I’m staring at the 880 points on my XBLA account and considering pulling the trigger on The Secret of Monkey Island right now, and probably will soon. Sam and Max episodes may have been laugh-out-loud funnier, but there was a lot of humor (probably closer to ‘charm’) in Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. I think this may have been my favorite Telltale game to date, and so I look forward to next month’s installment of piratey goodness.
