It's with a certain measure of dismay that the final chapter of Tales of Monkey Island has now come and gone. I've waited years for new installments of this cherished series and now that it's over, I want more. However, there is definitely room for improvement.

The story picks up where the last chapter left off, namely that Guybrush is dead. Yes, after years of sending LeChuck to the other side, it's now Guybrush's turn to see what lies in the hereafter. It turns out that the afterlife is populated with bizarre characters just the same as the living world. Now a partial ghost, Guybrush is clinging onto his last shred of life (an actual item in your inventory) and has to visit a few locations on the crossroads of the afterlife in order to jump back and forth from our world to the next in order to fulfill a voodoo spell to reanimate him.

Guybrush

The humor and callbacks to previous entries is still alive and well in this final chapter. One of the highlights is a sword fight near the start of the game. Taking its cues from the original game, you have to beat an opponent at fencing using insults and comebacks. The twist here is that you're in a three-way fight, also clashing with Morgan Le Flay, the pirate bounty hunter who was previously killed and now also appears as a ghost. But she's really depressed and you're trying to cheer her up. The mechanics of this fight were such that the response you choose had to at once insult the pirate you're fighting, but also be a compliment to Morgan. It's a tricky bit of business and was inspired.

The rest of the game followed the same path as previous chapters, with potion recipes to solve and items to use in bizarre ways. My biggest gripe though was the movement. I've complained in the past that limiting the user to ASWD or the mouse-dragging for moving around is extremely frustrating, doubly so given the fact that the Sam & Max games use a more intuitive mouse-click mechanism. I got over it a few chapters ago, but my rage against it came roaring back this time. Why? Because this chapter has way too much extra walking. There is a sequence where you have to walk back and forth between a few locations to complete your goal and it takes so much time. Add to it that the solution to that puzzle isn't obvious and you'll spend a lot of time going from one screen to the next, consulting the map, jumping through portals from the real world to the spirit world...it's all too frustrating. At the very least, they should have a quicker way to get around than the way the map currently works.

The final puzzle erased a bit of that bad taste out of my mouth. It's a fun sequence where LeChuck punches you all around the deck of his ship and you have to prepare items in such a way wherever you land so in order to launch yourself in a cannon (with a quick recall to the original game's pot-helmet). In fact, most of this chapter was fun and funny, but that nasty business about the movement and map really brought down the experience a few notches. I can only hope that they change it in sequels.

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