Welcome dear readers to the final part (for now) of our Monkey Island mini-blowout. Episodic gaming is a tricky beast to master, you have to be careful not to peak too early but you still have to keep the quality of the episodes high. This is especially true once you reach the middle of the series as Telltale have with their latest offering: Lair of the Leviathan.

After the obligatory catch-up speech from the Voodoo Lady the game opens to what I’m sure is the strangest setting in any MI game to date; the innards of a giant manatee. Anyone else in this situation would become resigned to their fate, but not Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate. After a little exploration you bump into Coranado de Cava, the man that the Voodoo Lady sent you to find all the way back in episode one. Unfortunately it seems the De Cava has been driven a little mad during his quest for La Esponja adding yet another enemy to Guybrush’s growing list.

I’m Coronada de Cava, mighty explorer

Soon after meeting de Cava, you find out that the manatee you are in is lost because he is missing one of his cochlea (a part of the inner ear that is involved in balance). To get to the sacred manatee mating grounds, and by association La Esponja, you are tasked with repairing the damaged inner ear.

Once you actually get stuck into the game and start to explore, you soon realise that there are very few locations to go to this time around. Within the manatee there are two different locales and when you escape the beast that number doesn’t start getting much bigger.

This means that almost all of the solutions to every puzzle within the manatee are within a rather small area. A by-product of the smaller number of locales is a decrease in the difficulty of the game in comparison to the previous episodes, where having larger number of locations increased the difficulty. Due to the solution to whatever problem you are having almost certainly being present on the same screen as the problem itself. Thankfully the design of the puzzles has been adjusted to compensate as much as possible. Including pirate face-offs, this game’s answer to insult sword fighting.

The fast travel system is a godsend even in such a small locale as the stomach of a manatee for one simple reason; the control scheme. As I’m sure you already know the controls in the game aren’t exactly the most elegant or intuitive, so any way of using them less is a big plus in my books.

Another quirky control issue that popped up during my playthrough of the chapter was on the screen with the mutinous crew of de Cava. For some reason no matter where I was nor which control set I used, the sprint function didn’t work. Telltale couldn’t possibly have made the conscious decision to gimp the controls further, so I will have to assume at this point that it’s either a bug specific to the review build of the game or a bug that somehow was missed during testing.

MWAHAHAHAHA

One of the more enjoyable puzzles sees Guybrush trying to beat one member of de Cava’s mutinous crew at a face-off. If you attempt this and fail, or don’t have all of the required face pulling skills, you will have to sit though the somewhat long mini-cutscene that prefaces each attempt over and over again. Unskippable dialogues are a thing of the past and shouldn’t be present before a puzzle that will be attempted a few times. This crops up several times throughout the episode and each time you have to restart one of the puzzles prefaced by a long conversation or an animated sequence it gets a little more frustrating.

As with the first episode it seems that the length of Lair of the Leviathan is somewhat lacking, taking me around two or three hours to complete. The main culprit that causes this to be the shortest episode of the three does seem to be the reduced exploration. Especially when comparing this episode with the second episode, The Siege of Spinner Cay, which had a multitude of different locales that could be explored from the get go. As the writers are getting settled into the series, it seems a shame we don’t get to see more content.

A few other points worth mentioning…

• Once again, stereotypes are relied upon for the creation of some of the characters. De Cava is a stereotypical Spaniard and his mutinous crew contains a stereotypical surfer and nerd.
• Despite the fact that there are few screens to explore, expect a fair bit of back and forth, either from screen to screen or around the perimeter of the bile pool.

With a much more memorable and interesting supporting cast and non-standard puzzles, Lair of the Leviathan is the best of the three episodes to come out of the series so far. It also has the most memorable supporting cast of the series to date. The problem is that it seems that both length and breadth of the episode had to be sacrificed a little in order to do this. Lair of the Leviathon is the shortest of the three. This is something that you especially don’t want at the midpoint of a series as it reaches make or break time.

You should play this game if’¦

…you have any semblance of sense of humour.

Final Score

So far the best entry into the Tales of Monkey Island series, yet is still hampered by a short length, small playing area and the awful control scheme that Telltale seem adamant to use.

(What does this score mean?)