Genre : Adventure
Developer: Telltale Games
Players: 1
Retail Price: $9, or $35 (as part of Tales of Monkey Island)
Availability: PC, WiiWare
My favorite Star Wars movie is The Empire Strikes Back. At first I thought this was because, as Dante puts it in Clerks, ‘It ends on such a down note.’ That was during my pessimistic teenage years, though, and so I’ve since realized that the ending represents Gustav Freytag’s climax, the moment when there’s no turning back and things will never be the same.
How does this relate to Monkey Island? Well, beat the last puzzle.
The tone of the whole chapter is different. That’s not to say it’s not funny, or is overly grim, though there is one part in the middle that caught me off guard. The puzzles deviate from Telltale’s almost-annoyingly-predictable three part structure: instead of needing three items to progress, or solving three sub-puzzles in a section, this chapter has two (okay, and a half) main sections with four and five subpuzzles each. I noticed that I felt almost overwhelmed when first handed the list of objectives, but they were always manageable enough. They were thankfully more difficult than in Lair of the Leviathan, and that combined with the longer series of tasks made this the longest Telltale game I’ve played to date.
Always the opportunist
Enough of the high falootin’ talk, though: the real takeaway from the chapter is that Stan is in it! I’ve only played a small amount of The Secret of Monkey Island, but it’s enough that, thankfully, I don’t have to say ‘I don’t understand why the guy’s coat has such a weird texture, or why he waves his arms around so much.’
This definitely seems like the gathering of the storms (quite literally, considering the pox cloud over Flotsam), with nearly all of the main characters from past episodes around in some form. As the title suggests, you’re on trial for all the misdeeds you’ve committed in the series so far, as well as a few you haven’t. It was interesting to see how your lying, cheating and stealing catches up to you: sure, you hoodwinked D’Oro into thinking you were giving him a Dark Ninja Dave Porcelain Power Pirate action figure, but what happened to him after you left? Poor guy. The judge of the trial, incidentally, reminded me quite a lot of the judge from The Wall, though WP Grindstump is much nicer in his day job as bartender than I imagine Pink Floyd’s is.
Tales of Monkey Island is nearly done with, at least for the first season, and so maybe I went in expecting to find grand gestures, but there were quite a few ‘oh crap’ moments, at least one of which reverberates back through the Monkey Island mythos to the start. When the final scene cut to black and teased the final chapter, Rise of the Pirate God, I checked my watch to see if it had perhaps gotten to be December 8th yet.
