Created by French developer Wizarbox and published by Reef Entertainment, Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is a pirate themed, fairly light hearted point and click adventure game that will need to try hard to avoid comparisons with classics of the genre (the most obvious being the Monkey Island games). The game is also a spin-off from a previous Wizarbox game entitled So Blonde from 2008.
You play as Morgane Castillo and, in the two level preview build we were provided, we got to control her at two different stages in her slightly spoiled, obnoxious life. First as an eight year old girl awaiting the return of her pirate father after a long voyage playing with her friends and handling a bully, and then as a sixteen year old serving on her father’s crew as the newly promoted second mate – tasked with finding a new client and some new crewmen.
The game is very colourful and presents numerous painted environments to explore, each filled with little details that reward someone paying attention to them. Even in the fairly low number of locations we were able to visit in the preview build, we found homages to everything from Metroid to Disgaea to Star Wars that technically added nothing to the game but were still fun to notice.
In lieu of proper cutscenes the same hand-drawn style applies to the story moments of the game, with still pictures shaken or put to effects to imply movement; and this also carries over to character portraits for standard dialogue. There’s a very distinct art style when it comes to the characters, and clearly each person has been designed by the same artist; and while this leads to consistency there is something about their style that, regardless of the gender or age of the character, results in them all looking slightly…sluttish. It will be an acquired taste is the best way to put it.
While the game is fully voiced, we struggled to be able to make a comment on this due to a bug we couldn’t seem to fix. Despite having a basic two speaker set-up and the music working perfectly fine, the spoken dialogue most of the time was inaudible or far too quiet. From what we did hear though it was not the best, and perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. The music is light hearted and ‘piratey’ but also lacking in variety – at least in the preview build – and resulted in it grating on us eventually.
Sadly the problems we had didn’t end there. The game was very clearly missing a level of polish that it will hopefully have at release. Hit boxes for interactions with the scenery were sometimes off, and one on occasion we found that there was no way to leave the area without bringing up the map and clicking out via that; and Morgane will frequently get stuck on nothing when trying to walk to where you have clicked. The translation also needs work, with some very noticeable grammatical errors popping up often.
As we played through the preview build we found it difficult to decide the target market that the game was aiming for. There were extremely light touches of humour but by no means were they the focal point, so this cannot be classed as a comical adventure in the vein of Monkey Island. Nor can it be classed as a difficult puzzle solver, as what we played consisted of fairly basic lateral thinking puzzles that would not be taxing for most age ranges.
That said, this level of puzzle solving and basic fairly light hearted story presented in Captain Morgane will probably better suit the Wii, DS or Playstation Move with the addition of touch or movement interactions providing a little more to hold your attention. On PC however it felt generic and basic with no particular hook.
Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is released Q4 2011 and will be available for Wii, DS, PC and PS3.
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