An excellent start to the season that had me begging for more

   
By now, we pretty much know what to expect from Telltale's adventure games. Featured within are lines upon lines of well-delivered and generally witty dialogue that accompany clever puzzles which reward thinking outside the box along with exploration. The developer has brought out another shining example of this with its revival of the Monkey Island games in an episodic format. Once again, Guybrush Threepwood, mighty though eccentric pirate has to face the threat of LeChuck, the evil Davy Jones-esque opponent that has haunted him since the original The Secret of Monkey Island.
 

This first episode starts out with Guybrush chasing LeChuck, who has tied up his wife Elaine and set her out to dry on his vessel. When Guybrush catches up to him, LeChuck is busy fighting a monkey, which gives Threepwood opportunity to board his ship, wake up his magical Cutlass and kill LeChuck. Or so he thought. Upon stabbing LeChuck in the gut, the greenish nemesis turns human, and some barrels of gunpowder catch fire. The ship blows up, Guybrush gets catapulted away and Elaine and LeChuck disappear from sight. He washes up on the shore of Flotsam Island. He then has to overcome several difficulties, in order to get to back to his lover and arch-enemy. Things unroll further from there.
 
However, the whole tale is more a backdrop to the proceedings of the gameplay. As Guybrush, you get free control over your character's movement using the left stick. Your inventory is on Triangle, and there's a hint system that makes Guybrush clue you in a bit on the solution to the puzzle at hand. The lack of a mouse is solved by simply allowing you to switch between the various selectable objects in the environment with R1 and L1. It's not perfect, but it works just fine. One very helpful addition is that you can press down L2 to highlight every selectable object on the screen, which makes the trial-and-error approach to certain puzzles a bit easier—though the only way to avoid thinking is by using a walkthrough.
 

You must complete various tasks that almost always require interpreting the inscriptions on objects, thinking logically and thinking outside the box. Clicking on everything and trying to combine certain things in your inventory you might never have thought of is paramount, but it does offer a real sense of satisfaction when you manage to outsmart the game and its characters. On top of that, everything you can see has something interesting going for it. Even if the object you look at is the most mundane and boring thing ever, Guybrush will make a self-aware quip that's always at least mildly entertaining. Seeing how the descriptions change once you start looking at them over and over into increasingly big jokes is quite funny, as is the fact that one of the characters actually uses the word droll at some point. These lines are brought forward with Threepwood's ever-raised eyebrow, and are a large part of what makes Tales of Monkey Island enjoyable.
 
While the interface does feel a bit clunky at times, the game looks good and sounds great. The music, especially, is fantastic. However, this does seem to come at the cost of lots of load times that are never overly long, but upon entering a new area (which you do about every five seconds when you're exploring) two seconds or so of waiting are still in order. It does get a bit annoying, mostly when you're looking for something or trying to follow a trail but you're not exactly sure where to go. But that is merely a small shortcoming in the overall excellence of Launch of the Narwhal.
 
The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal also ends with a pretty good cliffhanger that really made me want to see how the adventure continues, if the quality of this first episode wasn't enough already. If you want some good, old-fashioned swashbuckling with a good sense of humour that is short but sweet and promises good things to come. Telltale is off to fantastic start with this first entry to the season. You should try it.