I played and reviewed the more recent Nelly outing but didn’t go
back and play this. However a recent shot across my bows informed me it
had been rejigged in HD and now had voices. So it seemed like the
perfect excuse to shiver some more timbers with the nicest pirate on the
high seas.
It’s very much like the other game, so if you played that and
enjoyed it, you will be well pleased here. It is more muted in its
colour tones, and much “flatter” in animation style, but the charm
and the wit is there is spades (or is that spoons?), and the writing is
just as engaging.
Nelly is on a quest, tasked by the spirit of Captain Bloodbeard, to
find out what has happened to the Spoonbeaks at the nearby Barony of
Meeth. Once in abundance, they have not be seen for ages, and as a lover
of all small creatures Nelly is determined to get to the bottom of
things. She soon finds herself up to her eyepatch in pirate oaths,
tattoos, leprechauns and underpants. At the centre sits Baron Widebeard,
author and, perhaps not surprisingly, Baron of said Meeth.
The conundrums are largely all inventory based, requiring finding and
using items in straightforward and some not so straightforward ways. It
isn’t hard, but some of the more out there solutions had me scratching
my head for a while. There is also a code puzzle to solve (which is
rather good) and a little arcade game involving ducks to be completed,
that isn’t at all difficult. The end game involves manipulating a
piece of machinery that kept me plugging away the longest of any of the
outright puzzles.
You can’t help but like Nelly, and the rest of the characters aren’t
too shabby either. The leprechauns and the Dignified Ladies Association
appealed particularly.
Despite the warning by the maker (Alisdair) at the start of the game
that he pretty much did all the voices (apart from Nelly) so please be
forgiving, I actually thought they were pretty good. I did miss Tom
Baker from the other game, but who wouldn’t? If unlike me you have a
different reaction, you can turn off the voices and play the whole thing
with text only.
Speaking of Alisdair, he pretty much did everything else too so well
done him.
In terms of gameplay, its third person point and click, with a range
of menu buttons accessible top of screen. These include the save
function, a settings menu, your map, and a hint button which reveals the
hotspots. A generally jaunty soundtrack and appropriate ambient sound
accompanies Nelly’s adventuring.
At no time does Spoonbeaks Ahoy ever lose its bright and breezy sense
of fun. It’s a short, gentle and kind-hearted endeavour, and is hard
not to like.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
