Caribbean Nightmare, by Stefan Hoffman
In my Thirst For Blood review, I attempted to play fair with my dislike of certain kinds of zaniness, positing that maybe I just call the stuff I like “whimsy” and reserve the z-word for things that, for whatever reason, rub me the wrong way. But now comes Caribbean Nightmare to make me think maybe actually there is a more objective typology here. Like, whimsy probably takes one out-there idea and takes it to a bunch of different imaginative places, while zaniness thrills to constant rug-pulls and reversals; puzzles in a whimsical work rely on dream logic, with puzzle in a zany game using moon logic instead. And since something whimsical can curdle into zaniness if it wears out its welcome, the successful ones usually know to bang out early.
Anyway, all this apropos of Caribbean Nightmare, a big, robust comedy adventure whose appeal I can easily understand, but which features pirates, pirate zombies, pirate zombies obsessed with fitness and dancing to techno, pirate ghosts, aliens, and Doc Brown from Back to the Future in a cameo role; has puzzles that rely on intuiting the thermogenic properties of random algae and currying the favor of a parrot who responds with pathological approval to the color yellow; and boasts two major puzzles requiring you to run all over the large map with only thin prompting as to what you’re looking for, which I found out about well after I’d let out a two-hour-mark groan at what I thought was the final puzzle (which requires you to run all over the large map with only thin prompting as to what you’re looking for).
To each their own: to those reared on Monkey Island and eager to dig into a sprawling adventure for hours and hours, this Caribbean Nightmare could be anything but. So I’m aware that some of my response here is just idiosyncratic grumpiness combined with the stressful time-limits of the Comp. Still, I think there are some real design issues holding the game back. For one thing, the game’s custom system has a lot of features, like fully-integrated hyperlinks, but can still a bit awkward at times, in the way bespoke systems often are – in particular, dialogue (or any menu-based interaction, like disambiguation) requires you to look over to the sidebar to see your options, then type your response and see the reply back in the main window. In theory, it shouldn’t be that big a disruption, but in practice I found it distracting every time, imposing constant interruptions in the flow of conversations whose pacing often already lagged due to overly-loquacious interlocutors. I also experienced slight output and input delays that weren’t too big a deal in themselves, but added up to more friction than one really wants in a giant game like this.
For another, some of the puzzle solutions really could use some tightening. In addition to the leaps of intuition mentioned above, there are too many places where a simple command requires an exacting syntax to work:
> take treasure
Without a container, I would have little joy with the treasure.
> put treasure in sack
I couldn’t put anything in the sack.
> fill sack
I didn’t want to fill the sack.
> fill sack with treasure
[finally works]
The worst puzzles combine both of these flaws, requiring you to make a non-obvious connection and then try to get your idea across despite three or four rejections just in case the parser is being overly precious. Oh, and despite a promise to the contrary in the about text, there is a maze: it’s a small one, but of course you don’t know that before you start exhaustively mapping it, and it does lead to multiple destinations so you can’t just rest easy once you’ve found one path. Plus in a game with so much required backtracking, it helps make the prospect of trying a new item out on previously-established barriers feel like a slog rather than an exciting opportunity to make progress.
Put it all together and this is a game where I was checking the walkthrough early and often. And despite my aversion to zaniness, I’ll confess that there was some fun to be had along the way. But even if, in the end, some of my negative reaction to Caribbean Nightmare was just down to taste, I still think a version of the game that cut about 30% of the padding and most out-there puzzles, added a bunch more synonyms, and rethought the approach to dialogue would be even more fun for the folks already inclined to enjoy it.
caribbean nightmare mr.txt (397.6 KB)