Siege of Spinner Cay follows up on the excellent first episode

   
“The Siege of Spinner Cay” is the second installment in Telltale's revival of the Monkey Island series, called “The Tales of Monkey Island”. The first episode ended with a bit of a cliffhanger that had players such as myself intrigued, and episode 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off.
 
After being confronted by Pirate Hunter Morgan Leflay, protagonist Guybrush Threepwood loses his hand and replaces it with a hook, a fitting attribute for a pirate. He then sails off to Spinner Cay, an island inhabited by mermaids and mermen, where he finds Elaine and other important characters. The Merleader, a woman perpetually sitting in a bathtub, is involved in a fiery discussion with a pirate captain over the summoning artifacts for an object that might cure them from the Pox of Lechuck, the green icky cloud that is affecting every pirate in the Caribbean. So, Guybrush has to go out and find these artifacts before the malevolent captain does, and hopefully set things right.
 
Gameplay-wise, Siege of Spinner Cay doesn't do anything to switch up the formula, which is entirely to be expected. You still walk around as Threepwood and click on the various objects in the environments that can be interacted with, and Guybrush will either offer a humorous quip or put the item into his infinite pocket space, which implies that you will need to use it at some point.
 

The first episode had rather bland puzzles that could easily be solved by simply thinking about the relatively low amount of items in your pockets. Episode 2 doesn't feature especially difficult or obscure puzzles, but they have definitely gotten a bit more involved. There are some problems that need to be solved by thinking outside of the box... in a logical fashion. Monkey Island puzzles are well crafted in the sense that they require you to forget about the way problems ought to be solved in the real world, and rather follow the rules of Guybrush Threepwood's twisted world. There are some parts that felt like they were cheap tricks to extend the length of a puzzle, though, that feature problems that should be perfectly fixable with the tools at hand. Instead, the game forces you to go out and seek out a really contrived solution. Moments such as these mark the weakness of the point-and-click adventure game genre, a form of gameplay that is extremely rigid and comes out feeling slighty ridiculous (in a bad way.)
 
The game does open up a bit more, now that Guybrush has gotten away from Flotsam Island (which you can't return to in this episode.) Spinner Cay is the main locale, and every other island is hardly even worth mentioning, but it does offer a higher sense of freedom, even if the difference is small. The loads are still grating, however, and effectively discourage random exploration, at least on the PS3. I was desperate to get through each scenario in as few steps as possible, because having to step through a load time 5 times in a row just for the trial-and-error that some puzzles inevitably carried for me is just not fun. That said, the dialogue is still sharp, the humour is there, and Spinner Cay did not disappoint me. If you bought the first episode, and enjoyed that, I imagine the second installment will please you enough as to pretty much ensure your lasting commitment to the rest of the season. You should get it, if Launch of the Screaming Narwhal got to the pleasure centres in your brain.