At last I can tell you what I couldn’t in the last review, yay. Guybrush has been killed at the hands of the still human LeChuck….see we all knew he was evil this whole time. LeChuck had only just absorbed the accumulated evil of all the pirates and is back to his usual zombie/ghost/demon/something or other type self and wastes no time in converting Elaine into his Demon bride. Guybrush must now navigate his way through the crossroads of the dead in order to win back his love and ultimately his life with the help of a few deceased characters he has met in previous episodes and of course from the Voodoo lady who has been his main source of questy goodness throughout all of the Monkey Island series.
This is what we have been playing towards, the accumulation of all the games combined. All the puzzles are fiendishly tricky but easy to solve when you know how. The pace is fast and intense with so much happening you may have to pause the game from time to time just to take stock of everything and get back on track. While playing this one through the first time I ignored the majority of the speeches and totally missed the plot, so I played again and I’m glad I did because the story all comes together and almost everything is wrapped up rather nicely, items you carry with you throughout the game but appear to have no purpose are all used here. See, that ring Elaine gave you didn’t mean divorce at all.
It actually took me around 4 hours to play through this final episode because there is just so much to do, you could probably play it in about an hour and a half but then you would miss out on some memorable cut scenes and dialogue. My only qualm with this game is the ending, now I’m not giving anything away when I say this, but for such an amazing series to have a 30 second cut scene for the ending is an insult to the people who played it. You may as well have a congratulations game over screen instead! Sorry, but I get fed up of playing such amazing games only to have disappointing endings thrust upon me.
Apart from that I have no major problems with this game other than the difficulty level which may be a little too hard for players who have never enjoyed games like these before. If the difficulty had remained constant throughout the series or had grown steadily more difficult then that would have been fair enough, but this one took me quite a few tries to get all the puzzles right and I hate to admit it but I did have to peek at the walkthrough a few times.
All that aside though once you know what you are doing you can play through and just enjoy the amazing story and climatic battle between good and evil. What happens next however? As you know from the series you can’t keep a good voodoo saturated evil pirate down so I expect to see another game, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Thanks TellTale Games for bringing back a classic and showing gamers what a good adventure game should be like!
VideogameUK verdict: 7/10
