Review: Tales of Monkey Island:- Launch of the Screaming Narwhal

Those people at TellTale have brass monkey balls. Bringing back the much-loved due, Sam & Max, was one thing, but bringing back the seminal Monkey Island series is a hell of a risk. With the recently released Wallace and Gromit being more than a little underwhelming, fears were starting to creep in as to whether TellTale could do the series justice. It did.

Released as yet more episodic content, this first episode in the five-part tale is a great prelude for what’s likely to come. Classic puzzles, good humour and plenty of game for the price, Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is unlikely to disappoint many of the rose-tinted specs brigade, and should bring a healthy dose of new fans to the series.

Voodoo, hoodoo, what you don’t dare do people

Starting off on a ship attempting to rescue your wife by stabbing LeChuck with a voodoo sword, only to completely screw up the spell in typical Guybrush foppish fashion, you’re washed up on Flotsam Island. Your adventure, should you wish to accept it, is to escape this island. But it wouldn’t be Monkey Island if the solution to this puzzle was to chop down trees, find twine, combine trees with twine and float off the island.

Flotsam Island is besieged by gales, trapping you on the island, requiring you to find out what’s going on before you can even consider escaping and going after LeChuck. Along the way Guybrush encounters many puzzles, most of which (thankfully) have a sensible solution. To be fair even those that initially seem a little left-field in terms of solutions soon seem to make sense in a weird Monkey Island sort of way. There also much more consistency in terms of challenge and ingenuity than with the puzzles found in Sam & Max.

Where Sam & Max suffered from an awfully slow start and didn’t really get going until the third episode (and, in my eyes at least, never reached the comedic heights of the original game) Monkey Island gets off to a blistering start. The dialogue is tight, the puzzles clever and it leaves the player wanting more, rather than worrying whether the next instalment is going to be better. Navigating the jungle via the Treasure Map is also a neat touch, reassuring you that TellTale has thought really hard about Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal and hasn’t just tried to rush a game out and hope to rely on the name to sell the game.

You’ll never get it out of me LeChuck. I’m not a TellTale

I’d question whether episodic content suits Monkey Island though. TellTale has been quick to promise fans that they won’t experience the issues that plagued the Sam & Max games (constantly reusing the same locations, characters and dialogue), but it will still be interesting to see how it ties it all together to prevent it from feeling like five small games, rather than one large adventure. It does however bode well that they’re actually setting up future episodes by sewing seeds in the players mind (something that Sam & Max failed to do) causing you to question whether what you’re doing now may have a consequence further along the line. It certainly points to the fact that TellTale have listened to the criticism of its previous titles, both from the press and the gaming public, and looked to address them.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have issues. The control system can be labelled as interesting (sweeping the mouse around the screen to guide Guybrush around is one of the worst control schemes I’ve ever encountered) but thankfully this can be swapped for WASD keyboard controls. The voice acting is also a tad disappointing. TellTale did bring back the original Guybrush, but somehow he still doesn’t sound quite right. The ending was also a tad disappointing, feeling exactly what it was, a cliffhanger setting up the next episode, rather than the end of a game. And while funny, it didn’t ever hit the heady heights of the first two Monkey Island games.

But when the characters are so well developed, when the dialogue perfectly captures the essence of the originals and when you’re left counting down the days to the next instalment, those issues are soon forgotten. The four-five hours fly by and it rivals the best of the Sam & Max episodes (Abe Lincoln) whilst simultaneously being much funnier and better written.

It’s not quite as good as it could have been, but as the first episode in a series of five, it’s a lot better than I expected and provides more than enough content to justify the price. Better still, there’s the recently released Secret of Monkey Island on the X360 to tide me over to the next instalment.