Tales of Monkey Island – Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal Review

Thanks to my recent adventure into Zack and Wiki, I have found myself being a bit more curious about old-school point and click adventure games.

Then when Telltale games provided me with a review code for Tales of Monkey Island – Chapter 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal,  I decided it was time to jump right in and see what all this adventuring is about.

Besides being the game with the longest name ever, “Tales” is an episodic journey of the Pirate Guybrush Threepwood and the fifth game in the Monkey Island series.  The series has been well received throughout its 19 year history, however due to the stagnation of the adventure games genre, this is the first installment since 2000.

Telltale Games has done a great job of almost single handedly reviving the old play style of Lucas Arts adventures through their episodic releases of Sam and Max, Strong Bad, and Wallace and Gromit.  Many of them have even been released on Wii.  How’s that for mainstream?

Tales begins with Guybrush on his ship chasing his arch enemy Le Chuck’s ship in order to free his kidnapped wife Elaine.  That’s about all the back story you are given and that’s about all you need.  We have a protagonist and antagonist and a plot device, do you really need anything else?

The plot doesn’t try to get too deep into the backstory, simply because it doesn’t have to.  All you need to know about the setting and characters can be and is communicated within the first five minutes.

Very quickly Guybrush finds himself stranded on Flotsam Island, a strange island that is impossible to escape from, due to its unorthodox wind patterns.  The majority of the story and gameplay takes place in this setting.

As Threepwood, you must use clues provided by the people, items and environment to progress through the story.  Item combinations and scripted point and click events is the principle method of input and puzzle solving in Tales.  So, don’t expect anything high impact.

Launch of the Screaming Narwhal makes up for its low impact gameplay by giving healthy doses of brain food and wit.  The characters in Narwhal are fleshed out well and full of…dare I say it…character.  The script and situations these characters are put though are genuinely funny (something that is hard to pull off in gaming) and the voices are superbly acted.

I found myself engrossed in the story and at times laughing out loud.  This game drips of charm and has me wanting to jump further into the series with the subsequent chapters and the recent re-release of The Secret of Monkey Island on XBLA.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves though.  There were a few things that threw me off during the play through that I think should be mentioned.

The actions needed to solve the puzzles aren’t always apparent.  At multiple points during the game I found myself aimlessly walking around looking for stuff to click on hoping that the outcome of said clicking would be different than the last time I clicked on that random item.  This is remedied somewhat with the hint frequency adjustment setting, but the item combos needed to solve the action figure puzzle were a bit too “out there” to solve without major walkthrough style hints.

Also, I was playing the title on PC and I am accustomed to using my mouse on the highest sensitivity.  Narwhal, doesn’t use the default Windows mouse speed, and doesn’t have it’s own sensitivity setting. This got frustrating at times, when having to move alot of stuff from inventory to the game screen because the mouse wouldn’t keep up with my thought process.

Both of these things are very small issues with a game that was a joy from start to finish.  I think I like the idea of episodic content.  For $10 one can pick up the first chapter of Tales of Monkey Island.  If they don’t like it, they’re only out $10.

While the Narwhal chapter wasn’t terribly long, I can completely see that the five planned chapters are worth the $50 in play time.  Or, if you know up front that you are in it for the long hall, you can grab the entire 5 chapter set for only $34.95.  That’s a great deal, I might add.

Another benefit I see to the title being episodic, is that in a world of high speed action games and intense twitch based gameplay, a slow paced text heavy PC adventure could easily get boring before its complete.  Releasing the games episodically, doesn’t allow for this, and gives the player quick bite sized chunks of a great game.

(4.5/5 Stars)