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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Casual Brothers, Ltd. Released: March 14, 2019 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 or higher Processor: Minimum, 1.5 Ghtz; Recommended, 2.0 Ghtz Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible with 512 GB VRAM or higher Storage: 1 GB available space
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By flotsam 3 Skulls of the Toltecs Casual Brothers, Ltd. A game that has graced my shelves for years, in what I have always thought was a good-looking box, like many of its fellow shelf dwellers I had never played it. Until now that is. First released in 1996, the version I played wasn’t the one in the box but an enhanced version released in 2019. Near as I could determined the game is the same save for the graphics, which have been smoothed and upscaled to produce a sharper, more defined appearance. Toggle the graphics in the menu to see the difference. Plus of course it will run without furious fiddling on modern machines. You play in the third person as Fenimore Fillmore, a cowboy roaming the ‘old west’ during the Franco-Mexican wars. A chance encounter and subsequent gunfight puts him on the trail of three golden skulls said to hold the secret to a legendary Toltec treasure. What follows is a varied point-and-click animated adventure involving numerous inventory conundrums, conversation triggers, Wild Western tropes and stereotypical characterisations, the last of which is definitely showing its age. Everything is done with a left mouse click. Moving Fenimore around, exploring the game world, using inventory items, choosing your action verbs; left click all the way. In keeping with its original age, a list of verbs sit in a ribbon below the game world and you pick which action you want to engage in e.g., look, talk, give, use, pick up etc. Once activated, you click again on where you want that action to occur - perhaps another character, an item in the world or another inventory item. The action might then result or Fenimore might say something like “that won’t work” or “I can’t do that.” Usefully the default action is ‘go to.’ which means that after trying anything else that will be the active action, which makes moving Fenimore around less convoluted than it might otherwise have been. That said, his typical bow-legged single speed gait and some weird peripatetic perambulations might well add a level of impatience to your experience. The default also means that if you want to look at everything in a scene, you will need to choose ‘look’ each and every time. It would have been nice to be able to lock-in an action until you wished to change, but it’s a small thing. As well as walking, getting around will (not immediately but early on) involve a donkey and a rail-cart, and also a map. The map is the most efficient mode of travel as it sits in your inventory and you can use it at any time to access a different location. Should you prefer though, you can make your way back to the exit point of your particular location and then make your way overland to wherever you might want to go. As you move your curser around the game world, it will generate a relevant noun (rock, river, oven, Sheriff etc) just above the verb ribbon when there is something you can interact with. Choose your action and have at it. It is an incredibly open game from very early on, which is a two-edged sword. It means you can explore largely unhindered and if stuck just go and explore somewhere else, but also that the appropriate next step may not be close at hand. That wouldn’t matter so much if there was more direction at times, making being stuck all the more bewildering. Whilst my own failures were partly responsible, I did think it would have benefitted by being a bit more constrained and/or by being a bit more obvious at times as to ‘what next’. It is a ‘take everything try everything’ inventory-based game and there were things I would never have thought to try. Conversation puzzles also exist, in that eliciting the right information is necessary to trigger the way forward, and more than anything else I wasn’t always sure I knew what that information was. Which meant erring on the side of exhausting all topics, initiating conversations multiple times to achieve that, which made it quite a garrulous endeavour. Whether you find it funny will likely be a matter of taste. It tries hard, but most of it didn’t land for me. It wasn’t helped by the various racial stereotypes involved, which even in 1996 might well have been seen as insensitive. I accept that the game is trying to “caricature American Wild West themes” (to quote the GOG page), but it was all a bit much. It is voiced throughout, subtitles are available, and there is a sporadic soundtrack along with a range of real and cartoony sound effects. In conjunction with the visuals, the latter in particular gives it the vibe it is looking for. There are some sequences where you have to work out what to do in a limited amount of time, otherwise the conundrum resets. It just means you have to try again. The game saves automatically, and fairly regularly, but there is no indication it is happening. It does save on exit and you can just load that point next time, or scroll back through the strip of film on the load screen to pick another scene. I confess I made fairly frequent reference to a walkthrough, but I still think there are at least 6 to 8 hours of animated western hi-jinks to be had. And if you enjoy it, two subsequent Fenimore adventures exist. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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