The second episode of Telltale Game’s five-part Monkey Island episodic series, Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhale takes up where the first game left off, with mighty pirate hero Guybrush Threepwood at the end of a sword. Who was at the other end of that sword? And why did Guybrush’s wife Elaine look suspiciously chummy with his arch nemesis LeChuck when he spied them through his telescope?
I’m not going to tell you.
The Game: Like the First One, Only It's the Second One
It’s for your own good. Seige offers a series of amusing surprises to players, and I’m not the sort of person who ruins surprises. I won’t tell you what “rosebud” is or the big twist in The Crying Game. I am never that person who says, “you should really see that movie; it’s a shame she dies in the end.” So if you want someone to ruin the surprise by telling you what Seige is actually about, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
I can tell you that Guybrush needs the help of flirtatious, androgynous merpeople, and that LeChuck has become a very different sort of arch-nemesis, but beyond that, the only way to see what happens is to play the game yourself.
I will say this:
The second Tales of Monkey Island episode is every bit as good as the first. The story is engaging, the dialogue is funny, the puzzles are ingenious, logical and hard enough to make you think without being so difficult that you curse the game’s designers and their children and their children’s children. Basically, my review of the second episode could be summed up as: “read my review of the first episode; it’s like that with a different story.”
I can also tell you I played the game straight through in four hours. For three of those hours I was assisted by my friends Mimi and Nicole, who had come over to play Rock Band 2 but switch to Seige after the drum kit died and we ran out of songs any of us wanted to sing. But it got late, they got sleepy and I had to finish up on my own.
Conclusion: Don't Waste Your Time with Reviews, Just Buy It
The game ends with another cliffhanger to be resolved in the third installment. And here is something I can tell you without any fear of ruining the surprise: When the third episode comes out, I’m not going to give away any details of that one either.
