Publisher/Developer: Telltale Games
Genre: Adventure
Price: Five episode bundle at $34.95
Verdict: More humorous adventures from the folks at Telltale. Get it if you love Monkey Island or Telltale.
Pros: Excellent and humorous voice acting and script. Great visual style.
Cons: Some puzzle solutions seem illogical, convoluted, or indirect.

Screaming its way back into the lives of adventure gamers, Tales of Monkey Island launches on the PC, riding a sea-borne unicorn.

If you groaned at the opening sentence, then you’ll likely do the same to many of Monkey Island’s puns. If you grinned or giggled, then you may have a chance of liking what this title has to offer or you have a type of progressive neurological disorder. Just saying, those people grin and giggle at just about anything, even my poor attempts at humor.

Har har har!

As someone who has never played any of the previous Monkey Island titles I come at this game with a perspective that fans of the series may not understand or appreciate. With that said, Telltale does a good job of bringing this classic series to newer players without seeming to forcibly re-introduce characters and themes of the series. However, if you are a newbie to Monkey Island you probably won’t immediately understand some of the gags, character relationships, or what the heck a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle is and why that is funny.

Humor is the main attraction of Monkey Island. If you don’t mind corny humor you should enjoy it. Solving puzzles will take you from one gag to the next. The reward for each trial you conquer are a bunch of laughs. If you are new to adventure games, you shouldn’t expect any sort of action. It’s point & click puzzle solving all the way. There is no way to fail in this game; no game overs, no continues, nothing of that sort. The only way you “lose” is if you get stuck at a puzzle and not know what to do next.

Puzzle Pirates

While most puzzles are easy enough to solve, some are vague or make little logical sense. There were times where I knew what the ultimate solution was, what items I needed to do it, but not know how to execute the actions needed to solve the puzzle. It turned out the action I needed to take was not one that made direct sense to the intent of the solution. Solutions such as these can only be uncovered by endless clicking of various items and objects, not through an intuitive spark in the mind. This failing is nothing new with adventure gaming, though I hoped that the genre could have evolved past that point.

Most puzzles are not very frustrating to figure out and understand however, so you probably won’t run into this problem as often as I might have made it sound. Puzzles are the essence of adventure games. Take that away and you don’t have a game. It is as essential as having weapons in a First Person Shooter. And with any good adventure game, solving each puzzle comes with the satisfaction of accomplishment and the reward of an interesting cut-scene or funny gag.

A better name than ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’?

The game opens like the beginning of a (good) Indiana Jones film where the hero is at the high-point of a previous adventure. You play as Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. You find Guybrush confronting his nemesis, the undead pirate LeChuck for the freedom of his wife Elaine Marley-Threepwood. This opening scene serves as a brief tutorial for the ways you will have to solve the various obstacles in Mr. Threepwood’s path. It works well and uses every element that you will be using in the game proper.

A pirate without a speech impediment? Inconceivable!

Good humor cannot exist without good voice acting, and Telltale serves this up excellently. Guybrush is one of the better video game characters that my ears have witnessed. Every line is spoken with the right amount of cheese and emotional inflection. He did not sound like an unenthusiastic person reading off of a cue card (such as Bill Murray in The Ghostbusters game). The other characters in Monkey Island are well-spoken (for a bunch of pirates) but Guybrush is a stand-out performance.

The graphics are simple but stylistically rendered. Characters and locations are charming and memorable. Although, some of the models were literally “copy + paste” with some different clothes. My guess was this was to save on production time to help get each episode out on time each month.

Walk the plank!

Keyboard and mouse controls work, but can be a bit awkward. There is a mode of movement that seems to emulate the use of an analog stick with the mouse but it just didn’t feel right. I would have rather clicked on a spot that I wanted to move to. If you don’t like that, you can use the WASD or arrow keys to get around if you don’t mind only being able to move in 8 directions. As cruddy as the movement controls were, it wasn’t a barrier to finishing any of the goals in the game.

Parley?

The game is short, easily finished in a few hours. But, you have the promise of four more episodes of the story, one per month. Telltale have proven to gamers that they can deliver on this promise with Sam & Max and Strong Bad. Monkey Island fans have been fantasizing about a sequel to their beloved franchise and Telltale delivers in a major way. If you are looking for a good cheese and corn stuffed laugh, you can do no better than Tales of Monkey Island.

Tales of Monkey Island GIVEAWAY Contest

Do you want to win the first season of Tales of Monkey Island without having to shell out your hard earned doubloons? Of course you do! Why am I even asking? Perhaps it’s a head injury? Maybe that’s why I’m so dizzy all of the time. Anyway, YES you want to win the first season of Tales of Monkey Island! Click Here to find out how!