The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I was so excited about Tales of Monkey Island. So much so that I threw down my $35 the very day it was announced. No waiting. No nothing. Then what did I do?

Why, I waited most of a month before actually playing the first episode, The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, of course. C’est la vie.

BUT HOW WAS IT?

Telltale has its own brand of humor, and while I’ve always enjoyed it, it is different than that of Monkey Island. So there was a little worry there. I feel like what ended up was a little mixture of both. It feels like Monkey Island, in no small part due to the vocal talents of Dominic Armato, who is still wonderful as Guybrush. His delivery and most of what Guybrush says is spot on. Completely spot on. Everyone else is a little more Telltale than Monkey Island. Still, I didn’t mind. I very much enjoyed all the humor.

It was also obvious that they kicked the puzzles up a notch from their normal fare, as well. This… I liked less so. Normally I rarely have to look up a solution in a Telltale game. At most, I look up a hint for one puzzle. I looked up three different solutions to stave off frustration in this episode. This didn’t ruin the fun, as I do it for the conversations and whatnot, but man, I wasn’t expecting that. One puzzle, especially, I know I NEVER would have figured out without looking something up. Not going to spoil anything, but it was just so non-intuitive.
I mostly blame all of this on the hint system. Normally, Telltale’s hint system is really good. At the basic setting, if you’re standing around in one place trying to solve something, your character normally throws out humorous little quips that give you hints. I appreciate that. But it just seemed weirdly balanced in this game. It kept CONSTANTLY giving me hints on the treasure maps, which I needed no help with, and giving me no hints at all on the puzzles I was stuck on. Something seemed off. But hopefully they’ll get that fixed in the next episode. They’re good at that.

But seriously, the Treasure Maps. I have to agree with the press’s take: There was absolutely no reason to pad out the game length by making me solve multiple maps like that. That was pretty silly. I mean, I don’t mind it being the little separate minigame outside the game for little downloadable prizes? I think that’s a neat idea. But I didn’t really need to do that twice. Wandering about in a maze once is enough for me, thanks.

But yeah, Monkey Island is back in a wonderful way, thanks to Telltale. Pretty well the only way it could be better is if they spend obscene and non-sensible amounts of money on 2D animation, and somehow got Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert back to write the whole thing. But those weren’t going to happen, and I’m okay with that. I very much look forward to the future episodes. (Even if it’s kinda bullshit you can’t buy these episodes a la carte… doesn’t affect me though.)