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“LeChuck!” Mimi squealed excitedly at the appearance of the evil undead pirate.
No one could have been more excited to see a new Monkey Island adventure game than Mimi. A friend who played her first Monkey Island game at 11 years old, Mimi's excitement for a new game in the series, nine years after the last one, inspired me to invite her and her boyfriend Jeff to come over and play Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhale.
Mimi reacted to Narwhale like a rock fan at a reunion concert, excitedly greeting the return of each fondly remembered character. “Elaine!” she exclaimed. “LeChuck!” “Guybrush!”
The Story: Voodoo Swords, Pirate Ghosts ... That Sort of Thing
As the game begins, Guybrush uses a voodoo sword in an attempt to once again destroy the series’ relentless villain, the ghost pirate LeChuck. LeChuck, whose constant defeats have never slowed him down (“It’s nice to see your many deaths and dismemberments haven’t dampened your spirits,” notes Guybrush), is not vanquished by the sword. Instead, the voodoo sword brings LeChuck back to life and transfers his demonic energy to Guybrush’s hand, which spends the rest of the game punching Guybrush in the face.
Guybrush likes to introduce himself as “Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate,” but he is more of a nerdy, wisecracking troublemaker whose love for Elaine forces him to continually save her from the besotted and evil LeChuck. After Elaine is spirited away yet again, Guybrush finds himself marooned on an island where the winds blow perpetually inward, preventing boats from sailing out.
This means Guybrush must either redirect the winds somehow or wait until the invention of the airplane. He chooses the former option, and proceeds to do what he has done so many times before; talk to eccentric characters and solve convoluted puzzles.
The Pedigree: Smart Dialogue and Puzzles from Folks Who've Done It All Before
Developed by Telltale Games, best known for the episodic Sam & Max series, Narwhale has the same offbeat humor and ingenious puzzles of previous Monkey Island games. This is not surprising, since Telltale Games has many Monkey Island alumni on staff.
(Some history: LucasArts developed the previous games in the Monkey Island series. In 2004, LucasArts signaled their rejection of the adventure game genre by canceling a game called Sam & Max: Freelance Police. Much of the production team of that game went on to form Telltale Games. Surprisingly, LucasArts is now dipping its toe back in the adventure game waters, licensing Monkey Island to Telltale Games and porting the first Monkey Island game to Xbox Live Arcade.)
The puzzles in Narwhale are just what I like; difficult enough to make me work for the answers while not driving me to give up and search for help online. (I did, in fact at one point check a walkthrough at Mimi’s suggestion, but I shouldn’t have needed to.) Some puzzles are tremendous fun, as when Guybrush is bound to a swivel chair in a mad doctor’s laboratory and must figure out how to escape using a monkey, a banana dispenser and a vole-powered generator.
Other puzzles almost solve themselves. As Guybrush notes at one point, “it’s amazing how many of life’s problems are solved by indiscriminate cannon fire.”
The Presentation: Pretty Darn Good
Narwhale does an excellent job of recreating the charming, cartoony look of the previous game, Escape from Monkey Island, but Mimi and I agreed that Elaine had a different voice than we remembered. We were wrong: Guybrush and Elaine are both voiced by the actors who did the last game (although Elaine was voiced by a different actress in the game before that).
While Telltale’s Sam & Max series is made up of stand-alone episodes tied together by a story arc, Tales of Monkey Island is a single narrative broken into chapters. Once Guybrush escapes the island (which took me four or five hours – a good length for a single episode) the player is confronted by a funny cliffhanger that leads into chapter two, which will be released in August.
The game uses a more-or-less standard point and click interface. I say-more-or less, because rather than clicking on the ground to move Guybrush, you hold a button and move the Wii remote. This doesn’t work very well, so it’s fortunate you can also use the nunchuk for movement.
Having looked at both the PC and Wii versions of Narwhale, I regret to say the Wii version isn’t quite as good. Frame rates seem lower, giving the game a somewhat halting feel. And because the dialogue menu can be controlled both by the direction keys and by moving the remote, it’s very easy to move the latter accidentally while moving the former, resulting in a highlight of the wrong sentence.
The Conclusion: You Need This Game
Fortunately, adventure games are more about the writing and the puzzle design than the technology, and the Wii version is still tremendously fun to play. If you want a game that works your brain and your funny bone, you cannot do much better than Narwhale, the Led Zeppelin reunion concert of video games.
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