Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 2.0 GHz CPU; 512 MB RAM; 64 MB DirectX 8.1-compatible graphics card; DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card; DirectX 9.0c or better
Genre: Adventure
Release date: December 8, 2009

After battling vengeful pirates, being swallowed by a giant manatee and narrowly escaping the clutches of a prissy French scientist, Mighty Pirate, Guybrush Threepwood’s epic journey comes to an end in Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 5: Rise of the Pirate God. In this final act of developer Telltale’s point-and-click adventure series, the story comes full circle as our hero ends up just where he started: trading blows with his arch enemy, the demon pirate LeChuck.

Pirate God finds Threepwood crawling out of his own grave in the afterlife, after being run through by LeChuck at the end of Chapter 4. After a brief conversation with a ghostly ferryman, our hero takes a boat ride across the pirate version of the River Styx to the Crossroads, where the real world and the afterlife intersect. Seems that everyone who arrives at the Crossroads brings something with them from the corporeal world; Threepwood has his last thread of life, which he hopes somehow to use to return to save his beloved Elaine, who is still in the clutches of LeChuck.

There are three areas of the Crossroads: the Swordfight, the Thieves’ Den and the Treasure Hunt. Guybrush must visit each of these to find clues that will lead him back to the real world. At the Swordfight he is surprised to find fetching pirate huntress Morgan LeFlay, who’s lost most of her swagger after meeting her untimely demise, also at the hands of LeChuck. The Thieves’ Den is run by a hippie thief who pilfers the things that the lost souls bring with them to the Crossroads. And at the Treasure Hunt, Threepwood finds infinite piles of booty and Xs marking the spots where he can dig for more. Eventually Guybrush finds a recipe that, when all of the ingredients are found, will allow him to cross back over into the land of the living, where he can finally try to defeat LeChuck and sail into the sunset with his lovely Elaine.

Gameplay-wise, there’s nothing new about Pirate God compared to the rest of the series, from the deep conversation system, to the scroll that unrolls on the right side of the screen with the listing of your inventory items, to the movement scheme that depends more on the WASD keys than the mouse to move Guybrush from place to place (you can use the mouse, but the system is awkward and is better ignored). Since most of the game takes place in the Crossroads, the art style is predominantly dark, although you do revisit several brighter locations from earlier episodes from time to time. Music and sound effects are minimal, but the two major puzzles are expansive, forcing you solve poetic riddles and use the solutions to find the items you need to move on in the story.

Unfortunately, those of you who were looking forward to an exciting, edge-of-your-seat ending to the Monkey Island series are going to be sadly disappointed by Pirate God. The two puzzles leading to the game’s final confrontation between Threepwood and LeChuck are identical in structure (solve the riddles, collect the items and place them in a specified location), with no side puzzles to provide some variety. The series’ saving grace so far has been its clever, entertaining scripts, but there’s not a single laugh-out-loud funny moment in this entire game. Solving the puzzles requires way too much going back and forth between locations, and the automatic hint system provides less help than in any other part of the series. Which is a real shame, because the final puzzle of the game, in which you have to guide Guybrush to victory against LeChuck, is arguably the most frustrating one in the entire series. And because Telltale left out the end of the final cutscene and the entire post-credits epilogue from my review build, I still don’t know exactly how it ends.

Like a marathon runner who tries to dominate the race too soon, the Tales of Monkey Island series reached its peak much too early, just around Chapter 3. Rise of the Pirate God is the series’ biggest disappointment, combining a lack of gameplay variety, a boring graphics presentation and a surprising lack of the biting humor that made the best parts of the series so special. It would be great to see Guybrush and company back for another go-round; hopefully the next story will save the best bits for the end.

Our Score:
Our Recommendation: