Tales of Monkey Island Episode 4 Review Page 2

05 Nov 2009 at 15:23:52 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

For all the laughs caused by the worthwhile characters, it's also a chapter with a lot of pathos, particularly towards the end. One dark scene towards the middle is played utterly straight with absolutely no wisecracking, no upbeat music, no nothing – which is fine, until your next examination of an item brings one of Guybrush's usual chirpy responses. It's a little jarring.

The same is true of the ending, to an extent, which forgoes the usual “It's all going wrong but in a good way” that's been true of the past few games for something considerably darker that works as a wonderful cliff-hanger. Again, considering the rest of the series it's slightly out of character, but in no bad way.

Slightly more jarring are a few of the puzzles. By and large the quality is high, even if there is Yet Another Maze Puzzle (which, thankfully, is both shorter than the previous ones and solved in a clever way) and the chapter has two quest hubs, meaning it's hard to get truly stuck. The first, contained in a small area, revolves around trying to get Guybrush acquitted, and lets you tackle the four charges in any order. The second sees Guybrush trying to find six items in order to progress to the episode finale, and if you have trouble finding one you can happily move onto another.

Despite the solid but reasonable difficulty of most puzzles, though, there are one or two worked in for seemingly no reason other than to be a pain in the ass, like the bloody pepper puzzle. Working out how to solve it isn't particularly hard if you've taken the time to look around, but the solution involves backtracking for a few minutes before coming back in a hurry – and if you've set up the puzzle wrong, or you make a single misclick, you have to do the whole series of events again. From scratch. Messing it up once is to be expected, but if you're at all forgetful or easily sidetracked, expect to be wandering between locations a good four or five times to get it all set up again.

By and large, though, The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood is up there with Chapter 3 in terms of quality. For once it's nice to see familiar locations and find out how they've changed, there are a surprising amount of incidental laughs and neat touches, the puzzles – while certainly abstract – rarely require huge leaps of the series' own peculiar brand of logic, and the plot is advancing at a hefty pace. Plenty of plot is resolved in this issue and we're finally all set up for the concluding part of the series. Roll on Rise of the Pirate God.

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