As we touched on in our Röki review a few weeks ago, while nostalgic point-and-click adventures are not uncommon, good ones are hard to come by. Too often, the puzzles are more in the vein of stupidly obtuse than organic or logical. It is timely then that Willy Morgan And The Curse Of Bone Town, largely inspired by Monkey Island, releases right after Röki, to revisit the Lucas Arts roots of the genre. So does it fall into the same traps as the ones before it? Or does it manage to evade them and deliver a satisfying experience? Let’s find out.
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is a pirate-themed point-and-click adventure-mystery game developed by imaginarylabs and published by VLG Publishing & Whisper Games.
Back In Bone Town
The game is set in a fantasy pirate-themed world of Bone Town, where you return to after more than a decade, and tells a fun, if clichéd, story of adventure. You play as Willy Morgan, who, on the 10th anniversary of his father’s disappearance, comes across a letter addressed to him by his dad. After a tutorial involving finding the different parts of a bicycle, the letter guides him to the ominous-sounding Dead Man’s Inn in Bone Town in search of more clues, and that’s where the real adventure begins. It pays homage to Indiana Jones in the opening cinematic with the panning over maps schtick and encompasses that adventurous spirit throughout the game.
With over 12 locations to explore and 15+ interesting characters to meet, Bone Town is an exciting backdrop filled with possibilities beckoning to be discovered. After a brief snafu with the hostile, though oddly charming innkeeper, you’re tasked with finding 9 different pieces of a legendary pirate treasure map, left behind by the town’s ancestors. And that’s where Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town opens up.
Seeing the Sights
The characters are interesting and fun, and the writing, in general, is witty and humorous. Willy Morgan himself is a smart-mouthed, sarcastic protagonist occasionally delivering quips and remarks. The plot is nothing revolutionary but is competent at treading tried and true territory, and is a fun, and funny ride. The unique, 3D warped cartoon art-style -with curved walls and strange angles – gives Bone Town a dreamy, semi-magical tone, almost like Addam’s Family, and the soundtrack is catchy and had me humming constantly.
However, one thing to note is that the dialogue itself can sometimes sound kinda unnatural like it was translated from another language (which it likely was, seeing that the studio is based in Italy). Still, it’s easy to ignore after a while, and it helps that the voice acting itself is mostly decent. Some characters, like the grandma in the library, for example, don’t sound right but the overall quality of voice acting is good.
Bone Town is a fun setting with interesting places to explore and is perfectly sized for the story. The main drive becomes not solely to unravel the mystery of your father’s disappearance and an evil conspiracy lurking in the shadows but to just explore and learn more about the history of the town and the original pirate crew. Each location is interesting and has a lot of effort put into the design – be it a shady inn with a bloodstained carpet, a restaurant that specializes exclusively in chicken dishes, or a pub housing an impressive 3D printer. And each one of them also has one or more puzzles to solve.
Pointing And Clicking
Getting to the gameplay itself, it’s nothing outside of the typical control scheme for an old-school point-and-click adventure: you analyze your environments in search of clues and items you can pick up, that’ll go on to aid you in solving the environmental puzzles. By holding the space bar, all the interactive items in the location are highlighted which goes a long way in making the puzzles more accessible, as you don’t have to worry about having missed key items. Left-clicking on an item makes Willy either pick it up or interact with it in some way, when possible. Right-clicking has WIlly observing the item and remarking on it – wittily, informatively, or both. Plus, you can combine items to make a different one too- allowing for some clever, imaginative solutions.
While there’s a good amount of story that keeps the player intrigued and hooked in its central mystery, the puzzles, of course, make up the meat of the experience, so a lot of your enjoyment of the title rides on the puzzle design itself.
The puzzles in Willy Morgan and the Cursed Bone Town much too often fall on the side of stupidly obtuse rather than the logical one, which is a shame. This might not have impeded my enjoyment that much if the last point-and-click I’d played wasn’t Röki, but seeing as it was, some of the more insane solutions to puzzles annoyed me at times. However, though a lot of them can be obtuse, some others are fun and clever, and thankfully, they’re never boring.
For example, one puzzle involves using a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign to break into a supply closet, bring out a mop and a bucket, and scent it with perfume to make it seem like the domestic help had arrived so that you can then steal the key to the hotel room next to yours and find a hidden stash in its fireplace. Yup. Then there’s one which has you using a heat lamp (and certainly not an LED one or the stove, or the microwave) to melt some sun lotion in order to get the dreamcatcher off the wall and extract your bike’s front wheel out of it. If that doesn’t give you an idea of what to expect, I’m at a loss as to what will. If that sounds fun, you’ll get a lot out of Bone Town for sure.
Non-Linear Puzzling
A great aspect of the gameplay is that the puzzles associated with the different pieces of the map are independent so the pieces can be obtained more or less in any order. This is cool because it promotes non-linear gameplay – whenever you get stuck on one puzzle, you can switch to a different one easily and try your hand at that, instead of scratching your head over the difficult one.
The game also has a few quality-of-life features to speed up the gameplay, a double-click on the arrow allows you to skip Willy Morgan’s slow walking animations. You can pretty much fast travel to any one of the locations through your map. So, if you suddenly had a ‘Eureka!’ moment on a puzzle, you can immediately rush there all excited instead of having to walk from one edge of town to the other. Talking to characters leads to dialogue options like in RPGs, allowing you to choose from a few different options – most of them either humorous or inquisitive. So interacting with characters never feels like a chore, but an entertaining prospect. I do wish Bone Town was slightly bigger, with more locations and characters to discover, but what’s there will keep you entertained for a while all the same.
Verdict
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is a fun time, though it’ll have you mashing your head against the wall occasionally. However, you’ll probably have a wide grin on your face, entertained the whole time. You might have to look up the solution to a puzzle a couple of times, but you can reasonably figure out most of them by being imaginative, if not just resorting to brute-force trial-and-error.
Though it doesn’t succeed as spectacularly as Röki did in modernizing the genre and deliver a deep & meaningful story, the funny – if at times unnatural – writing, the sarcastic, witty dialogue, the interesting setting and characters, and most of all, the clever puzzles make Willy Morgan worth playing through, as long as you know what you’re in for. If Röki modernized the genre, Willy Morgan goes back to the glory and magic of Monkey Island– complete with flaws and all.