Siege of Spinner Cay follows the exact moment that the last episode left off, with Guybrush being held at sword point while his wife sales away with his arch-nemesis.
Once again Telltale proves that they are more than capable of continuing the same level of humor and insanity that graced the previous Monkey Island games that appeared almost a decade ago. With the game’s off kilter humor, it becomes rather hard to put down – much of that is helped with the insanely good sense of timing. The game as a whole remains funny beginning to end, and the flow feels rather good as Guybrush finds solutions to most puzzles that are almost never the most logic, but the ones that will lead to the best punch line.
Although some of the puzzles tend to be rather head scratching, a solution is easily remedied with the always present, and amazingly well written, built-in walkthrough. While following this process step by step does make the game entirely beatable in one very short sitting, it really isn’t meant for that. Half of the humor of the game is found by failing at attempts to solve different puzzles with the seemingly correct answer. Although all of the puzzles in the game can be solved with enough work and thought, the guide is a constant and well placed source to prevent against frustration and simply putting the game down.
Graphically, the game does a good job of getting across the entire sense of style while still managing to look fairly enjoyable. The game can run on fairly low end computers, but does offer support for higher resolution. This does manage to make the game look a little nicer, the only problem being that it just runs the game at a higher resolution and doesn’t have any bells or whistles to really turn up or down. Not that bloom lighting would really affect this game in anyway.
This episode of the series is once again amazingly voiced by a cast of people that seem to really get the humor behind the endeavor. Every piece of dialog in the game is spoken, once again, and all of it is done in a manner that adds to the experience and world that the game creates around itself. The voice acting itself is probably the one thing that manages to tie the entire experience together from the moment the game starts.
Strangely, this is the one episodic release that Telltale has set out into the wild that has come with only one purchasing option: to buy the whole season all at once. While this isn’t that big of an issue as episodes one and two are worth the price of admission on their own, it is kind of strange. This would be like saying that the next season of LOST is only available to the public as the DVD collection, and that they will still release them one episode at a time, but only after you buy the entire season. The product itself is entirely worth the asking price, it just seems like an odd way to sell it.
Tales of Monkey Island: Episode Two manages to be better than the first one in many, many ways. While this does not diminish the humor of the first it does give amazing hope for the next episode to what that could possible entail. It is a pretty good sign when a series is less than halfway through the course and it is becomes an easy recommendation to buy the entire season. Tales of Monkey Island is funny and enjoyable, and you should buy it.
