Game: Tales of Monkey Island, Chapter 3 – Lair of the Leviathan
Developer: Telltale Games
Genre: Adventure Game
Verdict: A lighthearted, inexpensive, casual adventure game
Pros: Funny; straightforward puzzles and adventure game
Cons:Perhaps too quick or easy play for experienced gamers
Acquired: Developer Provided
Here’s the thing I learned.
I always knew that treasure was where you found it. Only sometimes is it gold that someone has placed in a chest, and buried on a desert island under a large ‘X’. Sometimes it’s on the ocean floor, in a cave near the manatee mating grounds. Sometimes it’s a sponge. A magical sponge, to be sure, and decidedly non-evil.
I’m sure this will be useful to me in my everyday life. I know for certain that it’ll be great for Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™.
Tales of Monkey Island, Threepwood’s fifth piratey adventure, deals with his attempt to cure a evil Pox which first infected his arch-nemesis, LeChuck and then — due to a botched voodoo sword enchantment, infected his hand. The pox went on to become a cloud which covered the entire Caribbean. Now he needs to undo it all by finding La Esponga Grande, the magical sponge I’d mentioned.
Nothing is straightforward in the Monkey Island universe, so this chapter begins with him being swallowed by a giant manatee. This isn’t entirely bad, as this manatee had also swallowed the intrepid adventurer who you were sent to find, as he is an expert on La Esponga.
The good news is, the manatee is off to the mating grounds to meet the giant female manatee of his dreams. The bad news is, he’s lost his sense of direction, and doesn’t really do well with girls. You must navigate these difficult waters, while being accompanied by the Pirate Hunter/ #1 Fan, Morgan LeFlay who either wants to steal you away from your lovely wife Elaine, or capture you and send you to be dissected by the evil Dr. Singe (also appearing in this picture). This is Threepwood’s main goal throughout the game, and the next step on the quest to get the sponge which will save his marriage and — it so happens — the Caribbean.
Sound complicated? Convoluted? Crazy? Well maybe. But the puzzles are all nicely nested within one another, so you’re always very sure what is the next thing to do. The middle of the game, like all these chapters so far, opens up and lets you solve three problems in parallel, all of which must be solved before moving on.
That gives you some nice flexibility to do what’s really fun in this game, which is to click on everything, and take every conversational path to see what funny or silly thing Guybrush will say or do about it. The primary setting — the inside of a giant manatee — supports the humor, and it’s covered with all kinds of strange objects that you might imagine a manatee lost in the Caribbean might have: paintings, dubloons, torture manuals and demonic skulls. And a lost pirate crew or two.
The four hours that I took to play this game slipped happily by as I clicked around, combined objects and talked to the dysfunctional and bizarre characters populating the eponymous Leviathan. The puzzles largely reduce to logic, even if it’s slightly humorous off-the-wall logic. Solving the manatee’s love problems was perhaps the most frustrating of them, but also one of the more humorous ones.
The only puzzle that seemed even mildly unfair — and this only from a totally casual perspective — was one which required you to collect a series of things which didn’t show up in your inventory, or give you any way to really track what you were doing. I guess I could have used a pen and paper, but I’m not quite that old school. It’s not difficult or impossible by any means, it’s just difficult to keep track of your progress.
Still, that’s a minor beef, and doesn’t largely affect my opinion of the game.
The game by itself, runs around $9, if you can find it sold as a single chapter. The whole 5-chapter series retails at $34.95 and comes with a DVD at the end of the season. That’s about $7 per game, each of which has taken me about 4 hours, so far. I figure that’s about 25 cents / laugh, and even cheaper on a per-chuckle basis.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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