By Alex Prestia
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is a bad point-and-click adventure game. It’s frustrating to see a game released today be so bland and unoriginal that games from the early ‘90’s look amazing in comparison. It simply has no excuse to be so much worse than its predecessors. Even more frustrating: this game costs release $25 on the eShop. Don’t buy it.
The one good thing about Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is that it is mercifully short. Altogether it took me about 5 hours in total. 3 and a half hours into my playthrough the game crashed. Somehow that crash deleted my autosave. It also deleted the manual save I had done. So about three-quarters of the way in, I had to start the game all over again. But rather than bashing it based on what might have been an unlucky glitch, let’s talk about the game itself. You start as a gawky 15-year-old named Willy Morgan. His father mysteriously vanished 10 years ago; his mother is away on an archaeological trip down the Amazon. The game begins with Willy receiving a postdated letter from his long-lost father to come find him in the hilariously named Bone Town.
The rest of the story revolves around Willy searching through Bone Town for clues about his father’s disappearance and the location of Captain Kidd’s lost pirate ship. The setting, Bone Town, was meant to look odd, slightly off, just on the verge of spooky. The primary design choice employed to achieve this was to curve everything. Walls, beds, and floors are all curved just enough to make the dimensions of every room feel sort of wavy. It suggests a dreamish, borderline absurd world where anything could happen. Sadly this never comes to fruition. Despite looking like its being reflected out of a funhouse mirror, Bone Town ends up being very generic.
There’s the classic library, the church, the graveyard, the abandoned amusement park, the rickety inn, and a few other locations that seemed to have been taken directly off of a list of places that a spooky village should have. And of course all of this culminates with a trip to an old… -take a second to guess- …an old abandoned lighthouse that reveals the location of the final clue. All leading to a lost pirate treasure straight out of a Hardy Boys’ book.
And, yes, the world and characters are weird, sure, but they never feel that way on purpose. Take the name Bone Town as an example. It’s supposed to sound creepy, perhaps even macabre. Instead it reads like a dirty joke. Leonardo Interactive, the studio behind the game, is an Italian developer. I can forgive them for not understanding American middle school humor, but Bone Town most certainly doesn’t mean what they think it does. Time after time things being slightly off in the world of Bone Town seemed unintended. Instead of creating a creepy village it came off as a silly place that was trying way too hard to not make sense. I was laughing at Bone Town rather than being unsettled with Bone Town. As for the gameplay, it’s a very normal point-and-click adventure. It’s heavily reliant on picking up random objects and furiously trying to mash them onto the game’s backgrounds to trigger effects. At no point did one of these genuinely confuse me or make me pause and think in any interesting way. As a reviewer I was grateful for never being slowed down by the game’s difficulty. But point-and-click adventure games typically need to thrive on those “Ah-ha!” moments. Finding tricky solutions to interesting puzzles after a bit of thought is supposed to be the core gameplay loop; the story progressing should be the reward. Willy Morgan gets this backwards. Dialogue takes the lion’s share of the playtime. Mashing together various items feels like the reward for listening to NPCs lazily tell their life stories and comment on the state of crumbling Bone Town.
Take my example of losing 3 hours of save data. The second time through, not needing to take heed of anything the NPCs were saying, I made it back to where the game crashed within about 20 minutes. As the narrative careened towards its climax the only suspense I experienced was whether or not the game would crash again. And let’s talk about the climax, it’s particularly strange and highlights a lot of errors to the game’s approach.
SPOLIERS AHEAD.....
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Turns out that Willy’s long-lost father has convinced himself that he is a pirate. Aided by nutritious, hallucinogenic mushrooms he’s been living in a cavern beneath Bone Town while larping as Pirate the Kidd on his ancient pirate ship for the past 10 years. Upon entering this cavern Billy crosses over a natural chasm using a stone bridge. Clicking on the chasm makes Billy comment, “It goes really far down. I can’t even see the bottom.” Later he finds the chalice that his father has been drinking the hallucinogenic mushrooms from. With the objective of getting his father’s decade long mushroom trip to end Willy slips away to discard the contents of the ‘shroomy chalice as his father swash buckles with the Mayor of Bone Town (what a title) on the deck of the 300 year old pirate ship (what a sentence). At this point it seemed fairly obvious what to do with the chalice: throw it down the chasm that the game had so purposefully pointed out earlier. Of course, once I tried to do that Willy tells me that it won’t work because the chalice will float. Strange and obtuse nonsense. Basically that wasn’t the story the game wanted to tell, so I had to find a different solution. That solution ends up being on the pirate ship, below the main deck is an old cannon. Loading and firing the chalice from that cannon ends up being the right way to get rid of it. Of course, firing an ancient cannon within the small cavern causes a cave-in. Which proceeds to kill the Mayor of Bone Town as Willy and his, suddenly-not-tripping-balls, father escape back to Bone Town proper. It’s this sort of “Sorry you can’t use this very sensible option because we need to push the plot forward” puzzle-solution that is so dangerous to point-and-click adventures.
Already in these games players risk feeling like they’re being railroaded behind someone else’s logic.
All the time, solutions to puzzles feel more like they require reading the developer’s mind rather than reasoning out interesting problems. Willy Morgan could be retitled “Reading the Developer’s Mind - the Game”.
Did you need to know all of that to not buy this game? Probably not, but I didn’t want to leave any curiosity behind. Don’t buy this game.
If you really need a point-and-click fix: Grim Fandango costs $15 on the Nintendo eShop right now. Free flash games frequently do a better job at this genre. Go play anything else.
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