Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God

The final chapter is finally here.

It must be exciting to outdo yourself every time you sit down to work. The crew at Telltale make a business of it; each episode of Tales has been better than the last. They really pulled out the stops to deliver an exciting, challenging episode that takes less than four hours to complete but is epic nonetheless.

Last time, our hero Guybrush cured the Caribbean of the Pirate Plague (now dubbed “LeChucken Pox”), only to be murdered – to death! – by his longtime nemesis, the newly rezombified LeChuck. Guybrush must claw his way from the grave, back into the living world, and foil LeChuck’s scheme to use the powerful La Esponja Grande to gain godlike powers. The quest takes him through the pirate afterlife, some old locations (seen in a very new way), and to the final climactic battle. The stakes are high, the action is big. It’s an exciting three to four hours.


The puzzles are excellent, too. Telltale has always excelled at going beyond mere inventory-driven puzzles; the solutions are always more complex than “use item on everything until something gives”. In this installment, they have you traveling throughout the locations, finding new solutions to old riddles as conditions change. The various incarnations of Guybrush throughout the episode are a brilliant twist of and homage to the first games. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

Telltale delivers an episode that capitalizes on the story built in the first four. It’s a thrilling, entertaining epitome of adventure games.