Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle

Eight-year-old tomboy Morgane wants to grow up to be a swashbuckling, treasure-huntin’ pirate, just like her infamous father. In preperation for this, she spends her childhood years commanding a “crew” of her friends on dangerous adventures, such as beating up the local bully and smashing through bedroom windows. However, when her uncle suddenly disappears at sea, Morgane leaves her island home with her father. Nine years later, Morgane has grown up: the plucky kid has become a sassy, confident woman. After being gifted a regal sword and promoted to second-mate of a real crew on her seventeenth birthday, Morgane battles with gender-stereotypes as she sets out to prove that she can be as good a pirate as any man.

This is the back-story to Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, an upcoming point ‘n’ click adventure game from WizardBox, the developers who brought us the well-received So Blonde. Penned by Steve Ince, whose previous credits include classics such as Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky, it promises to be a humorous, witty experience with a particular focus on plot. I was lucky enough to be given an in-progress preview version of the game to test my prowess at combining items and navigating dialogue trees.

The local bully is defeated in a co-operative puzzle. The resulting dialogue made me giggle!

With this being an adventure game about pirates, I inevitably drew comparisons to the legendary Monkey Island series. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, though. The gorgeous, hand-drawn backgrounds – presented in 1080p – evoke memories of the art from Curse of Monkey Island, with the same bright, pastel colours and attention to detail. This carries through to the game’s cut-scenes, which use a combination of still art (in an anime-esque style) and animation to great effect. Thematically, in what is probably an intentional reference to adventure games of old (and to allow a slew of fun pop culture references), the world of Captain Morgane presents hints of technology and items that shouldn’t exist in the 17th century; on my play-through of the demo, I encountered a Mr. Potato Head, a plushie which resembles a Prinny and even a Worm (as in, Team 17’s strategy multiplayer series Worms) equipped with an eye-patch and pirate hat!

That’s not to say that what I played didn’t have its own flair of original content. In an effort to mix things up, the player is occasionally presented with mini-games, like the reaction-based sword-duel. This plays like a simplistic, Flash-based fighting game (complete with health bars and dash, fast and heavy attacks) but is a welcome diversion. Given where the story is going, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more of these as the plot moves forward.

There's some beautiful sights to behold in Captain Morgane.

Even with the excellent presentation (including dialogue where every line is voiced), I think the area that Captain Morgane most impressed me is its puzzles. As a bit of an old-hand at adventure games, I appreciated the balanced difficulty of its riddles. Even working through the “tutorial” portion of the game – the protagonist’s childhood years – they were a bit tougher than I expected, but never unfair. If you stop and think about them logically (and, crucially, from the perspective of a kid), they all make sense. Rather than hand-hold you through puzzles if you get stuck – something I’d argue fellow adventure game developer Telltale’s excellent games do a little too often – Morgane might prompt a vocal clue or prevent you from heading off to a new area to complicate matters. Handily, the inventory screen keeps track of your current plot objectives if you get completely lost, without giving too much away.

With a projected release date of February 2012, I look forward to playing Captain Morgane when it’s finished. Although I ran into a couple of issues during my time with the game – a sound balancing problem, path-finding conflicts and a dodgy voice-over or two – these are all relatively minor blemishes on a game that, with some polish, should make for a fun, solid adventure game experience.

I'm interested to see what happens now that Morgane has to find a real crew!

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