Tales of Monkey Island: Episode 1 Review

Finally Monkey Island returns to help revive the once popular, and recently dead, point & click genre but is the game worth ourRRRRRR time or does it deserve to walk the plank.

ARRRRRRRRGH!

A sort of sequel to the previous Monkey Islands, don’t think of Tales as Monkey Island 5; more like Tales Season 1. Yes that’s right, Monkey Island has gone episodic like a lot of recent point & click adventure games… which have mostly been by the same company, Telltale Games. Such games include Sam & Max, Strongbad and recently Wallace & Gromit (episode 3 of which we’ll be reviewing soon), but back to Monkey Island. In fact, a little history lesson.

When the ‘Funny & Clever Division’ of LucasArts closed, nod to Yatzee for that sentence, many working in F&CD went off to found their own companies. One of these was Telltale Games, who have since then created some brilliant and funny Point & Click adventure games in episodic fashion, which has worked to their strengths as well as the strengths of the genre. Now the company have returned to their roots with Tales of Monkey Island, and I can tell you it’s great to have the series return.

The game opens to an epic climatic ending, to some story that we don’t know about involving monkeys and of course the arch nemesis of the series LeChuck. It seems that even our hero, Guybrush Threepwood; Mighty Pirate™, doesn’t know, allowing you to ask the captured and tied up Elaine to explain.
Of course being Guybrush, he messes up the necessary fizzy rootbeer spell by dropping it within the first two minutes of gameplay, and so you’ll work out an ingenious way of recreating the spell. This leads to quite a twist which you won’t be expecting, and then bam – the title screen starts and you find yourself shipwrecked on Flotsam Island, where not much happens and the winds all blow towards you leaving no chance of escape.

As this episode is titled Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, you quickly run into a ship named the Screaming Narwhal which is the only ship on the island… but how exactly do you escape? Well we’ll leave that up to you to find out but trust us, it’ll be worth it. We’ve managed to run through the game at least four times and have a number of different times of completion, it’s taken us between two hours to four hours to complete the episode which isn’t bad for an opening chapter. Hopefully though the next chapters will be a little longer; but of course it’s all down to your player skill. The game does offer a hint system which is helpful from time to time.

The gameplay is typical of a point & click adventure title, combine item A with item B to make item C etc. But never forget the puzzles. The puzzles consist of traditional adventure game puzzles where you must use the environment to pass a predicament, as well as puzzles that require the use of items that you’ve collected and stored. Since the game is on both the PC and Nintendo Wii through WiiWare, the world can be explored through use of the keyboard and mouse on the PC, and the remote on the Wii. Although this is a PC review, the Wii version would probably be better if you don’t have a good PC, plus it’ll be more interesting with the motion controls as it seems like the perfect fit for a point & click game. See Zack & Wiki as an example.

Although the gameplay is the tried and true formula of point & click adventure games, it is refreshing to have once again the quirkiness of some the Monkey Island characters, and we personally hope to see Pete the Pirate and Murray from Curse of Monkey Island make a return.
Speaking of returning, the voice of Guybrush, Dominic Armato; the original voice of Elaine; Alexandra Boyd; and Earl Boen as the voice of LeChuck all make a return. All three of which are also doing the voiceovers on Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition.

Overall the game is a great addition to the series, once you hear the main theme you’ll feel like you’ve never left. If you loved the previous games, you’ll love this. It’s a great download title and speaking of which if you don’t want to download the game, once this season is over Telltale Games have said they will release a disc based version, we presume this will be on both Wii and PC.

So for now you have no choice but to download this game. Do it!

9/10