Tales of Monkey Island (2009)

🏝️ The Monkey Island universe is respected, humor included, with fun little nods to the various episodes in the saga.

🎙️ The animation and voice acting are truly high quality.

🎢 The adventure is full of twists, constantly renewing itself and even surprising at times with its boldness.

🧩 The pacing is well handled and the puzzles are entertaining.

🎮 The controls aren’t ideal. For a point and click, not being able to simply click to move your character is a bit of a letdown.

🐞 Bugs tarnish episode 4 and episode 5.

🔍 You’ll also find flaws inherent to the genre, such as lots of back and forth or a few far fetched puzzles, but they remain fairly limited overall.

Price: ≈ 13 euros (regularly on sale around 5 €)

Available on: Mac, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 3, Wii with a French text patch available online for the PC version.

Developer: Telltale Games ⚓ After a disastrous fourth episode and an art direction that may divide, this new installment works really well. I even preferred it to the third one: the humor hits hard (special mention to the “marquis de singe” and his hilarious French accent). Its flaws don’t spoil the whole experience. I recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, effective and delightfully cartoony point and click. Small warning: avoid the Wii version, play it on PC.

Tales of Monkey Island is a wildly mixed bag. It's mostly on the good side of the scale and playing it directly after Escape puts it in a radiantly positive light when it first comes on. The writing is surprisingly sharp and the character are instantly recognizable as the characters they are, at least with the Curse versions of the characters. Some of that is definitely the voice actors but it's clearly written by people who understand and appreciate the first three games. It's refreshing, especially after the disastrous writing of Escape. Tales is a bit on the ugly side, like most of Telltale's games, but it's never as bad as Escape. The graphical issues are almost certainly due to the budget and time constraints of being an episodic game from the era where that actually meant something. The main characters all generally look alright, and new characters like Morgan LeFlay fit right in, but when you get to the generic NPC-style characters, there are two, maybe three character models. It's a little off-putting and it's instantly obvious.

These issues are pretty apparent to anyone who plays it but really, most of the puzzles are good. Maybe not super clever but enough where getting through an episode feels good. Each of the five episodes are small enough that getting stuck doesn't seem insurmountable. The world only has so many places and so many things that a solution is always just around the corner. It gets tougher as the episodes continue and there are the usual adventure moments of "Who the hell would've figured that out?" but it's not like an 80s Sierra game by any means. The small worlds generally make trial-and-error attempts reasonable and doable. It does feel a bit long by the end of the series but maybe shoving all five episodes into a couple of days was my fault instead of spreading them out like they originally were. I did experience some really really really frustrating technical issues in episodes 4 and 5 though, where the game would just suddenly crash out of nowhere. The Telltale engine has always felt like it was held together with Elmer's glue and band-aids but I don't think I've ever had one of their games crash on me before. The very end of Episode 4 has an error where I couldn't click on a character to do the final action I needed to do so I had to watch the ending on YouTube. That was a major bummer. Tales is a decent game overall, though the worst of the good Monkey Island games. It's so much better than Escape though.