Genre : Adventure
Developer: Telltale Games
Players: 1
Retail Price: $35 (as part of Tales of Monkey Island)
Availability: PC, WiiWare
I do believe we’ve reached the point in every Telltale series where reviews begin to take on the quality of ‘Uh, yup, it’s a Telltale game…’ So let’s leave out the formalities dealing with the who and what and why and jump right in to Chapter 3, which picks up immediately after its predecessor. This leads me to two statements I should make at the start: If you haven’t finished The Siege of Spinner Cay, stop reading now; and Tales of Monkey Island, more than any other series so far, would flow perfectly if combined into a single release on disc.
Lair of the Leviathan handles many of the dangling plot points left by its older silbings: you spend most of the episode interacting with starstruck pirate hunter Morgan LeFlay, you meet Coronado de Cava on his search for La Esponja Grande, and, oh yeah, you’ve been swallowed by a goddamn manatee.
As you might expect, being in the bowels of a seafaring beast leads to a goodly number of poop jokes. It’s not even the quality of the writing in Chapter 3 that I enjoyed (which I did), but the phrasing of dialog made funny things funnier. That said, there were also some prefabricated characters, like Moose the surfer/fratboy who says what’s probably the most annoying word ever, ‘bra.’ His model was straight out of ever other Telltale game ever made (including Telltale Texas Hold’em), and even Noogie the nerdy bongo playing pirate bears a strong resemblance to other pudgy characters in the Tales series. The manatees, though? Top notch. I want more games with manatees in them.
After Spinner Cay, there were complaints about the ease of the puzzles. While I still maintain that the 2.5 hours I spent with the episode was more than enough entertainment for my money, in Lair of the Leviathan I have to agree. I only had one real ‘I have no idea what to do now’ moment, and I’d attribute that more to the camera being too far away from de Cava’s camp. It was still fun to play through the scenarios, but in more of a ‘Metal Gear Solid cutscene’ way than a ‘Brain Age I-said-BLUE-you-stupid-polygonal-head’ one.
Ending on the least suspenseful final scene thus far, Lair of the Leviathan still manages to make me look forward to The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood by virtue of being entertaining. Not as challenging as I’d have liked, yes, but enjoyable nonetheless. A tip: watch the entirety of the credits (which are worthwhile on their own), because Samuel L Jackson makes a cameo. Well, in spirit at least.
Now I’m thinking about Sam Jack playing Winslow in a film adaptation. ‘Aw hell, it’s that bitch LeFlay!’
