Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet
Application Systems
Ahoy there maties! Its Nelly,
the wannabe pirate and bird fancier, back bigger than ever thanks to a
kickstarter campaign and ready to shiver your timbers, find some
treasure and save some birds. With a little help from Dr Who.
If your penchant for adventuring
is inventory based quests, it’s hard not to see how you wouldn’t enjoy
Nelly. Add a plucky heroine, a jaunty nautical feel, a British air and a
rather good bit of writing, and why wouldn’t you play?
And that’s without further
mentioning the bird that is Dr Who, known as Sebastian to his friends.
No scarves or jelly babies though.
These types of games are not my
first choice, but there is a lot to like about The Fowl Fleet. First and
foremost is Nelly, who according to the credits plays herself, and what
an excellent job she does. She sucked me in, and stayed appealing to the
end.
We first find Nelly stuck in the
ship's mail room doing not the least piratey things. However the ghost
of William Bloodbeard appears, demanding that she find the fiendish
Baron Widebeard. While she thwarted him last time and saved the
spoonbeaks, she apparently missed a pirate code that would have led her
to the treasure of the seventh sea, and Widebeard is now in pursuit.
Lest birds be perishing, Nelly had better do something. The first
something is making it to Port Rubicund to pick up the trail. But how to
get there?
Needless to say she does, and
very quickly embarks upon a multitude of questy, inventory based
puzzling. With conversations thrown in. Find a new home for the seagull
to get the hat, get the shirt off the sailor's back by solving the
embarrassing lack of chest hair, nobble three runners in the underground
races so another can win in order to get the Kings Shilling, and dress
up as a boy, all just to leave the second location. After doing some
other stuff. If this is your thing, you will be right at home.
The conundrums aren’t generally
hard, and there aren’t too many whacky inventory combining or using
solutions. Which ensures things keep rolling along at a good pace. There
is a bit of back and forth, even if you haven’t missed an item or two,
but the environments aren’t that large, and will eventually be aided by
a map.
Sebastian can help, by assisting
with tasks, giving you his opinion on other characters, or by suggesting
a line of enquiry. Plus he keeps track of the many tasks Nelly has on
hand at any one time. All in that debonair voice.
It’s a punny game, some laugh
out loud, some corny. All of it though is delivered in a rather
authentic manner, not forced and not overly contrived.
There are plenty of other
characters, with silly names and sillier moustaches. Some are perhaps a
little too stereotyped, and cringe-inducing as a result. But on the
whole, they are as they should be in this type of fare. We have
villainous villains, toffy toffs, scurvy knaves, and wholesome birds
warranting rescuing. Plus an abominable snowbird.
The look fits the goings on, and
the sound effects are what you would expect. Point and click your way
around, right click to examine and left to use and reveal hotspots if
you want. Steam achievements are available, and I only got about half,
so they aren’t just for progress through the game. It will save on exit,
but you can also save at will, and it will pick up where you left off by
choosing Continue from the load screen. The inventory pops up by moving
the mouse to the bottom of the screen, which occasionally got in the way
of some worldly interaction, but was quickly remedied.
I did think the music got a
little repetitive and the several mini games I could have done without.
But all in all it was a jolly bit of uncomplicated fun.
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon
HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
March 2016
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