NerdMentality | PC REVIEW - Tales of Monkey Island: The Siege of Spinner Cay

Viewing Entry

PC REVIEW - Tales of Monkey Island: The Siege of Spinner Cay

Posted August 30th 2009 by Derrick Lutz.

Tales of Monkey Island: The Siege of Spinner Cay

You know how when you're tired, your brain doesn't always work at full speed, and even simple things can be hard to grasp? When I started playing The Siege of Spinner Cay, the second chapter of Tales of Monkey Island, I was pretty tired. This made the puzzles seem harder than they really are. If your mental state is completely lucid, there's nothing too difficult in there. The worst moment for me was when I needed an item to complete a puzzle, and it was more or less randomly placed in the world. There was no logical reason for the item to be where it was, and no reason why I would look there other than because I had looked everywhere else. It's like an Easter egg hunt, except you don't know what you're looking for and really you're not 100% sure that you even need to be looking for something. So... I guess not that much like an Easter egg hunt. This kind of puzzle is bad form for adventure games, but the good news is it sticks out because most of the puzzles in The Siege of Spinner Cay are solved with intuition and logic.

In the first chapter of Tales of Monkey Island, you were confined to one of two locations: your ship and Flotsam Island. In this second chapter, your world has been expanded and now includes several new islands. The Jerkbait Island chain is a sub-area consisting of three locations; in addition to that there are three more small islands which are spread around the world. So there's quite a bit more ground to cover and that can be a problem when you don't know where to go or what to do next. When you run into that metaphoric wall, Guybrush (your character) will occasionally give a hint on how to proceed, but these hints are often both vague and obvious at the same time. Sometimes he'll mention a specific item you need to use which is somewhat helpful, and other times he'll simply say that something still needs to be done before moving on. I don't know how that even qualifies as a hint.

The humor in this chapter is improved over the first. They've graduated from delivering a series of smirks to occasional laughter. The characters have amusing interactions, helped by their expressive faces. It's really just a lot of eyebrow movement, but it works. However, the design of the characters still hasn't grown on me; they look like relics from a more primitive time in computer graphics. But they get the job done, and after a collective 12 hours of playtime, they're not distractingly bad. That's really the best I can say about them. The environments are comparatively well realized; they're colorful and interesting to look at for the most part. There is one notable exception: this chapter, similar to the first, has a jungle where every screen looks quite the same and it can be very frustrating to try and navigate to a particular spot. There is a puzzle which requires you to get from one area to another with the minimum amount of movement possible, amplifying this problem.

The Siege of Spinner Cay is a solid second chapter in the Tales of Monkey Island series. It's funny, the puzzles are mostly well designed, and the presentation doesn't get in the way. There's not much more you could ask for from this type of game. If you were waiting to see if the series as a whole would be worth your time, I think it's safe to jump in now with two of five chapters released. If you're new to adventure games, this series is the best place to start today.