Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3: Lair of the Leviathan page 2

29 Sep 2009 at 16:27:16 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

There are no arbitrary mazes here, and no pointless locations. You won't be spending a few minutes traversing the fields to get from one area to another. More amazingly - considering the few locations - the puzzle quality largely holds up. While there's the inevitable "three quests" in the beginning, even that manages to feel fairly novel with some amusing puzzles throughout. If anything the game is a touch on the easy side, but I prefer this to the alternative. More to the point it's easy for a good reason: the puzzles flow naturally from the game logic that you should have a handle on by now.

Better still is that the supporting cast, ignoring my beloved Morgan for a moment, has also been fixed. Each new character introduced in this episode has his or her own look, voice, personality, and quirks. Don't expect stereotypical pirates with peg-legs and eye-patches brandishing parrots at you and saying "Arr" in a scratchy voice, like pretty much every bit part from the first two episodes. Here, you have a group of very different and very memorable characters. Hell, I can even remember their names, which is something I couldn't do with the other episodes.

The other thing Telltale has done in this episode is play with the old insult sword-fighting formula. Those who remember the original Monkey Island game will remember insult sword-fighting, but for the uninitiated, swordfights were won through wit rather than action, with an appropriate response to a thrown insult being the way to score a metaphorical point against your opponent. Here, a puzzle towards the end is a fantastic allusion to the system, with you using a rudimentary dictionary - full of the typical language book phrases, like "How much is it?" - in order to woo someone on behalf of a reluctant suitor, based on responding to what they say first.

That said, Lair of the Leviathan falls down in one critical area: the humour. While it's frequently amusing (there's that word again), it's never laugh-out-loud funny. Each of the previous episodes had at least one moment that made me burst out laughing, but Leviathan managed - at best - a wry chuckle. This isn't as big a problem as it first appears, thankfully, as the humour is at least consistent. Fewer lines fall flat than in the previous episodes, which I imagine is at least in part down to the smaller locations - fewer areas and hotspots require fewer jokes, which means fewer strained attempts at hilarity and fewer misses. While it's never laugh-out-loud funny, there was no point in this episode in which I was anything short of entertained.

There's also a part of me that misses the sprawling exploration, but the advantage here is that - despite there being very few locations - they generally feel a bit more alive and better designed, as they're packed with things to interact with, and solutions are never too far away.

So it's a smaller episode than the rest, but not necessarily in a bad way. This, really, is what I want from episodic gaming: a highly enjoyable mouthful. Telltale has finally nailed it with Lair of the Leviathan. While it's not perfect, it's got enjoyable puzzles, good characters, well-written dialogue, and it advances the overarching plot nicely. A round of applause for Telltale, please.

Comment