Review of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island by thorn969

This was pretty obviously and explicitly and thinly disguised ripoff of Monkey Island, by some of the same staff. I thought this looked good, much better than A Vampyre Story - perhaps partly because I was able to play this properly? To get A Vampyre Story to run on a modern computer, I had to run it in safe-mode with the cutscenes as MPEGs and DirectX9 disabled. This game was patched by the developers to run. I found these puzzles to generally be more intuitive than A Vampyre Story, which I played immediately beforehand. There three very annoying sequences that, as far as I could tell, were guess-and-check with difficult to understand hints as to whether one was correct. The charades sequence mentioned in the review, the sword fight, and the final battle. The final battle consists of a… perhaps somewhat anti-climactic… stand on a platform moving around to reflect energy bolts back to the caster. There are about a dozen points to stand at, the bolts move randomly, and you have to hit three correct points.

The humor, as pointed out by the reviewer, probably more frequently missed the mark than hit the mark. There was some attempt to be feminist and culturally sensitive, although perhaps not enough… I thought the female did get better treatment than in The Curse of Monkey Island, as one of the primary characters, although there was plenty of misogynist talk from the male characters.

The story was generally satisfying, the characters were fun, the gameplay was good, the graphics nicely cartoony. A very solid effort.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right