Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista, 2.0 GHz CPU; 512 MB RAM; 64 MB DirectX 8.1-compatible video card; DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card; DirectX 9.0c or higher
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now

In each of the first three episodes of the Tales of Monkey Island series, pirate good-guy Guybrush Threepwood has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But in the penultimate installment of developer Telltale’s five-part story, The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, our hero battles something even more fearsome than the pirate pox, prissy French mad scientists or lovelorn manatees: the pirate justice system.

After recovering Esponja Grande, the magic sea sponge that is supposed to be the key to curing the pox that he unleashed way back in Chapter One, Threepwood has been betrayed and captured by the fetching (and conflicted) bounty hunter Morgan LeFlay, who was hired by Flotsam Island’s twisted doctor the Marquis de Singe to bring Threepwood back to Flotsam so that he can be used in experiments designed to grant the foppish Frenchman eternal life. LeFlay completes her contract, but de Singe is not pleased: Esponja Grande has cured the heroic, hook-handed Guybrush of his special strain of the pox.

However, de Singe isn’t the only Flotsam resident questing for Threepwood’s head. Upon arriving back on Flotsam, Guybrush is arrested and charged with three dubious yet serious offenses, each of which carries the death penalty. And to make matters worse, the prosecutor in Threepwood’s trial is another character from his past, a slick, flashy (literally) shyster named Stan, whose objective is not only to convict Guybrush, but also to make a mint from selling trial-related tchochkes at his stand outside the courtroom. Threepwood, acting as his own attorney, must clear himself of all three charges, then figure out how to use Esponja Grande to cure the pox once and for all.

With nothing new in the gameplay mechanics department, Trial, like the previous two sequels, has to keep us interested using an entertaining story and snappy writing, but this episode hasn’t quite hit the mark. And it doesn’t help that we’ve returned to the familiar ground of Flotsam Island, which we extensively explored in Chapter One. Puzzles in Trial are sparse and wildly illogical; you need to either take copious notes or play the entire episode in one sitting (not much of a stretch at about four hours of gameplay) to solve its two major conundrums without consulting a walkthrough. The second of these puzzles has you constantly referring to a map, which wouldn’t be so bad if you could assign it to a hotkey instead of having to open your inventory and examine the map every time you need to decide which way to go.

But the biggest disappointment of Trial is the script, something that has carried the series thus far with its goofy dialogue and colorful characters. Whereas the stories in the previous episodes are constantly lighthearted and fun, the tone of Trial is decidedly dark in places, almost as if the writers are trying to drift the plot farther into the drama column. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing, but turning on the melodrama leading into the final episode of a series that has lived off of its sense of humor could turn out to be an unfortunate mistake.

I suppose it was unrealistic to expect that the momentum created by the stellar Lair of the Leviathan could continue with The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, but it just wasn’t to be. Trial‘s scarcity of puzzles, the recycling of old locations, the weakness of the writing and the darkening of the overall tone of the story gives me the impression that the writers knew how they wanted the series to end, but they weren’t totally sure how to get from Chapter Three to Chapter Five. Trial is a significant step backward for a series that can still redeem itself with a great final act.

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