I've been wanting to play this since it got released as freeware, I guess mainly because it got released as freeware, plus it looked like goofy fun and it had the SCUMMVM Seal Of Approvalᵀᴹ.
I played through the opening 'escape a room' puzzle and into the main jungle hub. So far, the game most reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever - there's lots of energy and stuff going on, lots of custom animations etc, and the production values are fair, but also the art direction is a little disjointed, everything's a bit clunky, and it's a 90s game pastiching 50s B-movies so there's some slightly thoughtless stuff in there (nothing awful yet, but the lead character is the type to get himself in trouble by romancing mobsters' girlfriends, and two of the initial puzzles are waiting for a showgirl to take a shower so you can hand her a towel - at least you look away - and dressing up in drag to get past some goons). It feels like Beneath A Steel Sky but without the ambition. As for the humour - on the one hand, the lead character is called Joe King, most of the jokes are breast and penis related, and there's already been an anachronistic Terminator quote complete with Arnie impression, but on the other hand I did just get past a gorilla by pointing out to him that he shouldn't even be in an Amazonian jungle thereby making him disappear in a puff of logic. So I'll continue through the very Monkey Island-esque jungle for now...
-
I've got to the next section. It's all okay, it's just a little unimaginative - the story's bare pastiche and the puzzles are all very basic (the only places I've got stuck have been due to not realising that some dialogue option three levels deep had appeared, or that an item had regenerated in some far-off dead-end of the map). The humour continues to be of the 'these sexy amazon women have captured us to have sex with us, and we don't want to leave!' variety.
There's a joke with a long muzak-backed elevator ride, and that elevator goes down a long shaft to a secret underground lair, so I guess we were making more clever adventure game references in BTDT and LOTCG than we realised! (Our versions are better, obvs.) Besides, there's also a grim reaper type ferryman, so if we get accused of ripping this game off, we're taking Curse Of Monkey Island down with us.
-
The next section was a mostly humourless temple section that gave me unpleasant flashbacks to FoA, though it wasn't half as irritating. I'm well-versed enough in Lucasarts games that I instantly figured out the pulley puzzle and the 'follow a guide three times to get through a maze' puzzle. It then chucked me back into the jungle section, and I couldn't be bothered to walk round the whole thing again just to check if anything had changed, so I used a guide. It's a good thing I did, as nothing had changed and all I needed to do was make an utterly random guess that there was a safe was hidden behind a cabinet. After that there were a couple of incredibly easy puzzles and the game abruptly ended.
Overall it was fine. It had some charm, but the irritations (like multiple music tracks having a high-pitched chime every few seconds) and lack of polish (like every area having fullscreen graphics that only fully revealed themselves when the UI changed to make way for a transparent dialogue tree, and certain rooms having a bug where the talk animations went on for ages after the dialogue had stopped playing) really brought it down, and there was nothing about it that particularly stood out. It was pretty cool to hear Penelope Keith doing VO though.
Rating: Orange.
No comments:
Post a Comment