Oh boy, that sure was an adventure game created in the mid-90s. The big innovation for The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge - as I learned from @arbitrarywater directly in the comments for the intro and indirectly from the game itself - is that it has multiple solutions for its puzzles. These alternative solutions often, but not always, involved different levels of dickery: part of the game's narrative focus was in choosing just how "evil" Malcolm was. You spend the whole game proving his innocence for the murder of the Royal Family, which predicated the very first game in the series, but no such extenuating circumstances are offered for the admittedly relatively minor crimes that followed after Malcolm took over and turned most of his fellow wizards into stone. Malcolm is a bad apple, in so many words, but it's down to the player just how rotten they want to play him.

Unfortunately, while the idea of having multiple solutions for the same immediate problem is a fun idea - one that Double Fine's Stacking utilized to great effect - in practice it made the game very muddled and obtuse, more so than it ever needed to be. The thing is, when you have multiple solutions to a problem, that also means multiple sets items and multiple angles of attack to get there. Therefore - and this holds especially true if you didn't actually know there were multiple ways to complete the chapter - you end up with a full inventory of items that will collectively get you most of way towards any number of different approaches and no idea where to follow through. The first "act" of the game, where Malcolm has to figure out how to leave Kyrandia so he can scheme and recover his magical abilities without being arrested every five minutes, is the one that really emphasizes the game's non-linear puzzle-solving, presenting a number of ways you can complete the goal of leaving Kyrandia by hook or by crook. The route I chose - which involved breaking through a wall in the sewer and recovering a "portal potion" that spirited Malcolm away to a jungle island populated by talking cats and dogs - was the easiest of six different possibilities: the others involved sneaking onto the circus ship by procuring some balls and putting on a juggling act; doing the same thing but with a mime act; disguising yourself and convincing Zanthia to help brew a "Pegasus potion" that allows shapeshifting magicians to fly to and from the island; use the carpet in the sewer to travel to Darm and Brandywine (the wizard and dragon from the first game) and give Darm a sandwich for a hint to "click two 'eels together" to leave Kyrandia; or keep escaping the prison as the Kyrandian authorities find more elaborate ways to keep you incarcerated. The middle part of the game is then much more linear, if still irritating in its own way, before it branches once again near the end based on a choice you can make regarding your Greek chorus of a conscience.

Compounding this issue of being drawn in a half-dozen different directions depending on which route(s) you're inadvertently edging towards is the series-wide insistence on a limited inventory of items that can be respawned elsewhere in the world in case you lose them, but not always conveniently. Certain items might take a lot longer to get together, and when they're accidentally consumed in a failed attempt, the player has to retrace their steps to collect it again. A certain puzzle near the end of the game required that I find sesame seeds, germinate them using eels caught in the sewers (OK?), water them (not wet enough already?), place the resulting plants in the filler pod at the local dairy farm, and then figure out how to get the cream from the automatic milking machine. You need a straight nail to puncture the cream's container, and while straight nails are common enough items I didn't have one on me at the time. When I came back to the dairy farm after finding the nail in the local dump (where Malcolm starts the game), everything had reset - the cows were gone, and the filler was empty. That meant repeating the whole sesame seed process, not particularly richer for having learned my lesson.

The game doesn't stop being annoying there either; in fact, almost true to the spirit of its mischievous protagonist, it will go out of its way to be constantly irritating. There's the prison sequence I showed you in the Intro blog where you have to follow a set of commands to create ten doilies before you can make parole. When you reach the bizarre, metaphysical plane of Limbo it regularly tugs you away from whatever you were doing to play Tic-Tac-Toe with the mercurial Fish Queen. The only way to move on is to let her win - she's an incredibly bad player, so you have to actually make an effort to lose - and then sweet talk her prowess sufficiently before she'll let you go. It took me so long to figure this out that I was stuck playing this ridiculous game for almost half an hour. And then she'll drag you back after five or so minutes have passed, regardless of where you were or what you were doing. The talking cat island I talked about has a no-foolin' complex maze jungle, and you have to hack apart the same five or six ferns every screen in order to move to the next. In addition, there are random piles of snakes that can appear after hacking through a fern, and if you don't immediately deal with them - say, by clicking on another fern instead because you're running on auto-pilot after far too long spent in this confusing arboreal labyrinth - they kiss you to death. There's perpetual aggravation everywhere you turn; I had the mistaken belief going in that the game intended for you to prank and belittle Kyrandia and its ignorant citizens as a depowered but still savvy Malcolm, when really it's Malcolm (and the player) that is at the mercy of Kyrandia's relentless animosity.

For as clever and experimental as Malcolm's Revenge is in theory, and admittedly has some very amusing writing as a bonus, it's an extremely difficult game to like in practice. It never quite realizes the potential of its Nice/Sarcastic/Lying dialogue tones, the score system makes less sense when you have multiple solutions to puzzles that presumably result in different amounts of points (if I had to guess, I'd say getting the max score means progressing all the routes to the end while only actually finishing one), it's filled with puzzles that require a lot of trial and error and/or endless busywork as you pick through a huge trash pile of knick-knacks for the handful of items that serve any purpose, and replaces most of the beautiful pixel art backgrounds of the prior games with these ugly, early, pre-rendered polygonal models and animations. As what I believe was the last intended game of its trilogy, bringing a hanging thread from the first game back full circle, it feels like the video game development equivalent of trashing your apartment on moving day with the tacit knowledge that the landlord was a jerk and you were never going to get your deposit back anyway.

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