Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town (PC)
It’s become quite common for an indie developer to create their game in the mold of one of their favorite classic games, and Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town’s influence will immediately become apparent once you find out it’s a point and click adventure game taking place in a former pirate town. While the reverence for the Monkey Island series is clear, Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town stands apart from its influences just enough to avoid feeling like a retread. Funnily enough though, its design and visual style make it feel like it could almost pass for one of the cleaner 3D point and clicks released before the genre went dormant in the early 2000s, although the inclusion of later inventions like a 3D Printer would certainly break such an illusion.
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town kicks off when 15 year old Willy Morgan receives a letter from his father 10 years after his disappearance telling him to head to Bone Town. Settled many years ago as a pirate town, Bone Town’s pirate history has the promise of riches for whoever can find what they left behind, but the modern state of it is rather sad. Now a quiet burg with few residents, Bone Town is a shadow of its old self, but as Willy begins to investigate why his father went missing, he’ll discover not only the more exciting past of this place, but just how this place experienced such a decline.
Despite the town you spend most of the game in being a sleepy place with an unfortunate history, Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town does try to keep things fairly upbeat when you’re just interacting with townsfolk and learning the tasks you need to complete to get closer to the truth. Willy is a chipper protagonist who can pull out a quip as a silly reply to the villagers when he wants to, but despite the entire game having voice acting, the lead character feels a little awkward for it at times. He seems to sometimes shut down a dialogue with quick statements like “I understand” regardless of if that’s an appropriate finisher, and his delivery doesn’t help the humor much. Things are certainly light-hearted, but joke punchlines are often rather weak, the game leans on referential humor a fair bit, and the villagers are often lacking the sort of quirky or distinct personalities needed to make conversations with them interesting beyond their practical purposes. Luckily the few characters who are dry like the priest are written to make use of that, with other characters like the restaurateur being somewhat interesting due to his devotion to his all chicken menu, and the starving artist character leans into the tropes of such a profession barefacedly enough that its brazen acknowledgement of them might elicit a laugh or two. The citizen’s lack the depth of personality to be particularly memorable, but they play their roles sufficiently and don’t demand too much of your time so they don’t irritate either.
Bone Town itself is probably the most interesting aspect of the game though because of how well it plays into the point-and-click puzzle solving. Once you have the freedom to explore the city’s key locations, the entirety of Bone Town essentially becomes one big puzzle where you need to speak to business owners, learn what they have or what they need, and begin to piece together what other part of town connects to it. Willy has an inventory that can grow quite substantial in size but is always easily accessible by opening a menu bar at the bottom of the screen, and in a rather cute touch, he politely asks nearby people for whatever tool he wishes to take rather than just snatching everything he can carry. A map lets you quickly travel to different points in the town, meaning you don’t always need to click to walk between screens to travel, and once you’ve got a good picture of the town, it’s fairly satisfying to start piecing together the relationship between places. The range in difficulty for the inventory puzzles never reaches anything too complex or strange, although there are a few oddities along the way such as knowing all of the tools needed to perform a vital action but not understanding why you even need to do it until you see the result.
There are some clever puzzles to be found before Willy’s even left home to begin his journey such as using cabinet shelves as a staircase, but there are also some cases where the game is a bit too generous with its clues. Sometimes you need to combine inventory items, and when you present them for the right situation, the clue an item is not in the right state can range from acknowledging it needs to be altered somehow to outright telling you the specific necessary step to make it work. Willy can observe objects by right clicking on them, and sometimes he might immediately say what needs to be done to it which doesn’t feel like an organic way of setting up a puzzle, the game boiling it down to just following his orders. You will still have room to puzzle out quite a few of the solutions on your own and rarely does it feel like you’re left without something you could be doing that might help you if one situation has you stumped, and that’s another way where Bone Town’s size benefits it. Entering a new shop will give you new items, new information, and a new objective, and after you head to the next few destinations, you’ll likely have something that ties back to the first location that then either wraps up its troubles or contributes to the grander puzzle some more.
The detailed, often busy backgrounds of Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town are an impressive touch to the visual design of the game. While the characters are a bit gangly and cartoony, the vivid backdrops are intricate and show a great degree of care went into making Bone Town a well realized location. But of course, in a point and click, such an attention to detail can lead to important items getting lost in the clutter. Seeing every single book on the shelf in the library and every shingle on every roof top is stunning despite them having the benefits of being static images, but pixel hunts for the tools you need to play are never fun. Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town gets to have its cake and eat it too though, the player able to hold down space to have interactive objects highlighted with small orange targets. Since the challenge of a good point and click is using the objects correctly rather than finding them at all, this touch really helps keep the game from dragging, and considering it’s a rather short adventure so long as you don’t get stumped for too long, it’s nice to see it isn’t padded with artificial difficulty either. The reasonable puzzles design, item highlighting, and Willy offering solutions in his dialogue unbidden might be a sign that the game is attempting to be inviting to younger players, and while it’s not quite as charming as other entry level point and clicks, it isn’t ever off-putting either.
THE VERDICT: Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is a sufficiently enjoyable point and click made in the style of its predecessors, but it lacks some of the charm and wit of its better written ancestors. While the simple plot and functional characters are neither good nor bad, Bone Town ends up being the star of the show. Interconnected puzzles across the locations of the old pirate haven allow for much greater puzzle depth than you might expect from such a short adventure, and while the game does give you solutions a bit too freely at times, it has some fun ones to puzzle out and helpful tools like the item highlighting with the space bar to avoid pointless pixel hunts. Since most of the game is about unraveling Bone Town’s mysteries through the inventory puzzles, Willy Morgan’s adventure still turns out alright despite having very little personality.
And so, I give Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town for PC…
An OKAY rating. Willy Morgan’s personal quest to find his father and the cast he interacts with along the way are surprisingly not the big draws of a game that draws inspiration from older titles beloved for their quirky characters and witty writing. It tries to have some personality but flounders a little in the execution, a few moments maybe earning a chuckle but a lot of the humor a bit basic or reliant on a reference landing. Characters definitely needed to have stronger personalities to help them stand out, almost every character playing into the tropes of their archetype a bit too eagerly to stand out. However, as pieces of Bone Town’s intertwining inventory puzzles, the residents play their parts adequately and with a few small but nice touches sprinkled throughout. Willy Morgan himself could have uses a more fleshed out personality as well as a more reserved approach to him giving out hints, especially since the game feels like it would mostly have its clues on what to do covered well enough by the space bar trick and Willy discarding items he no longer needs.
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town can’t quite capture the appeal of the games it is emulating, but it has a satisfying selection of inventory puzzles that are linked together well enough and a fair bit of heart that shines through with things like the intricate background details. It doesn’t excel enough to really stand out as something worth picking up compared to its competition unfortunately, and even what seem like allowances to invite in younger players don’t feel substantial enough to invite in genre novices either. Being only a few hours long at least means it isn’t a demanding experience, so perhaps its niche ends up being a quick and decent point-and-click adventure to scratch an itch during some downtime. It may be a little hard to justify the trip to Bone Town, but at least it’s an entertaining enough visit when you do get there.