Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town | PC Review

August 12, 2020 Tomas Becks

Pirates are cool. Well, not in real life of course, but in almost every work of fiction, pirates are awesome. Whether it’s Treasure Island, Pirates of the Caribbean, maybe even the Pittsburgh Pirates, they’re everywhere in our culture. Pirates have a particularly long shadow in gaming and especially in the adventure games genre. Anyone who loves, or even likes, this genre knows what I’m talking about: The Secret of Monkey Island series, with its lovable, goofy and silly pirates and the lead Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™! You might be wondering now what this has to do with Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town, Italian indie developer imaginarylab’s first foray into gaming? Because Willy Morgan is a big love letter to Monkey Island.

The Vanishing

Willy Morgan is a traditional 3rd person point and click adventure game. We play the titular Willy, the 15 year old son of very adventurous parents. His mother is on an archeological mission, and his famous father Henry disappeared without a trace in Bone Town ten years ago. His adventure starts when he receives a letter from his father, telling him that he needs to investigate his disappearance. Somehow, the letter arrived ten years after he vanished. Willy obviously wants to know what happened to his dad, but immediately runs into the first problem he needs to solve: he has no money and his bicycle is literally all over the place in 8 pieces. This is where we take over and set Willy on his quest to find outthe fate of his father.

Goonies Meet Indiana Jones

It’s clear that Willy Morgan is a labour of love for Ciro Camera and his team. The graphics are gorgeous, the music is very atmospheric (although a bit repetitive at times), the voice acting is very well done, and the story is familiar yet delightful. The Monkey Island influence is pretty clear if you’ve played the games. There are some great in-jokes and visual homages, but the game managed to stay on the right side of that. The game is good enough to stand on its own. It does wear its influences on its sleeve, but doesn’t lean on them too much. I also got quite a Goonies vibe from the game, which is never a bad thing, as well as a sprinkle of Indiana Jones, which is most certainly not a bad thing.

Easy To Learn

It’s fun to meet the peculiar inhabitants of Bone Town, and learn a bit of the history while you’re trying to find out what happened to your father Henry. It’s very easy to move Willy around in the beautiful surroundings of the once grand locations of Bone Town. The controls are as simple as can be: you just point and click. It’s in the genre name, after all. Left click is use/pick up and right click is look at or walk. If you’ve never played a game like this, you’ll need about ten seconds to get used to it, but experienced adventurers can definitely skip the tutorial and jump right in.

How Do You Break your Bike?

The story is engaging, and the puzzles support this. The bicycle puzzle is a bit of a stretch, because it’s never explained why the bike is in pieces all over the house, but that’s a minor nitpick. The other puzzles made total sense to me, they were not too challenging, and they drove the story forward. There are some inventory interactions and imaginarylab added a hotspot finder, so there’s no pixel hunting. This is very beneficial to the pacing and takes away a lot of frustration, making for very smooth gameplay.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with this game. I played it twice; first an extended demo that still missed some music and voice acting, and then the complete game with everything present. For a debut, this is a very solid and joyful addition to the adventure game genre. My only main point of criticism is that it’s relatively short. It took me about four hours to complete, but I wanted to stay longer in this world and go on more adventures with Willy. I really hope Ciro and Co have some more adventures in store for Willy Morgan. Because solving the curse of Bone Town should only be the beginning.

To hear me talk more about Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town, be sure to listen to Episode 304 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:08:32 time stamp.

This review is based on a PC copy of Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town provided by Homerun PR for coverage purposes. It is currently exclusive to that platform.