Tales of Monkey Island: Lair of the Leviathan
I've briefly mentioned the badness of this series' control scheme before, but I feel like I should give some more explanation. In typical old adventure games, you walk somewhere by clicking on your destination. Sometimes you can double click to run there or something, but basically it's click and move. Not terribly elegant, and it can sometimes cause issues, but it works. This is what Telltale did with earlier episodic games, and it was fine. Then with Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures, they added arrow key movement, which worked out great. It was simple to go wherever you wanted, and basically played like a regular game. So did they keep this system for their Monkey Island series? No. Well, did they at least revert to a system that had been proven to work for decades? No. There's an all new system where you click anywhere on the screen, hold the button down, and then move the mouse in a direction to basically Guybrush there. I can't tell you how bad this is. It is basically playable, it just leads to more frustrations than a control scheme ever should. You can still click on objects to walk right up to them, but the standard movement is just painful for no reason.
Anyway, chapter three! It wasn't that great. It wasn't bad either, and I enjoyed it about as much as the second game. It's a game spent convincing people things that aren't actually true, and there's a bit of creativity in how you're supposed to go about it, it just results in puzzles that don't make as much sense as I'd like. The things it gives you to figure out what you should be saying don't seem quite as useful or easy to mess with as they should be, and it just made the whole game feel a bit laborious. It's the sort of thing where it works as the third part of a story, but it would be totally unsatisfying as a stand alone game, and since that's how I'm trying to experience these while remembering the context of the whole story, it does suffer a bit. Luckily it's just a bit of a lull in the saga and it never does anything that bad anyway. It just felt more like a chapter that I had to get through rather than one I wanted to experience in full.
