Knights of the Cardboard Castle

To be honest, I mostly played this just to get it over with rather than because I have any real interest in it, so there’s not much to say. As with the first Monkey Island game, this was a remake of the sequel by a mainly Singapore-based game. I zipped through it by making liberal use of the in-game hint system rather than subject myself to the torture of figuring out impossible combinations of objects.

• Like the first game, the humor is mainly of the wry grin rather than the laugh out loud variety. There are more meta-jokes too, which can be tiresome if done too often and somewhat alarming in what was only the second game of the series, but I enjoyed them well enough. Example: Guybrush often asks others, “What is the Secret of Monkey Island?” in reference to how the first game never actually answered that question.
• As a nice addition to the traditional point-and-click only gameplay, there are some timing-based puzzles. There’s even one puzzle which uses a rudimentary physics system!
• There are three islands representing distinct play areas and you’re free to move back and forth between them. The problem is solving a puzzle usually involves visiting each of them multiple times. It’s horrible. The developers even mention that they did this to extend the length of the game. They’re honest at least.
• As usual, I was okay with the puzzles which worked logically, i.e. getting a parrot to help you find the treasure by feeding it crackers, and knowing that the parrot knows this information from its dialogue. But there were still plenty of item combinations which would have been impossible without the hint system, such as wielding a live monkey as a wrench to shut down a water pump. That stuff just makes no sense!

As you can probably tell, it’s more of the same old, same old. I enjoyed the developers’ commentary and the unlockable artwork pages (which shows how the artists built the game one painting at a time) more than the game itself. I’d say that this is further proof that adventure games, but I’ve been hearing good things lately about the Walking Dead game, so I could yet be proven wrong.