Monkeys and Car Keys
Monkeys and Car Keys is a new school parser puzzle game: it’s unabashedly a puzzle game, not much interested in having character or story beyond providing a setting for the puzzle, but it is also very mindful about fairness and convenience and making sure that the player doesn’t get stuck much. It’s also, and importantly, both charming and well-made.
The set-up is this. You’re in the jungle, and after hours of searching you finally found your car again. That’s great, except that the local alpha primate has grabbed your car keys and is hiding with them inside a secret rock chamber. You need to get those keys!
In the first segment, which is the most original, you uncover three statues fitting the traditional monkeys of not seeing, not hearing and not speaking. Using your smarts you find a way to have one of these monkey statues translate the language of the actual monkeys for you, thus gaining the information you need to discover a further path. I liked how the jungle setting and these well-known icons, now so familiar as emojis on our phones, combined into a neat puzzle. In the second segment, you need to solve a few puzzles involving ropes and bridges; these were less original but worked well enough, and I enjoyed the fact that you need to collaborate with the monkeys to make it happen – this is a game where the NPCs are more frequently helpful than antagonistic. In the final segment, there is an antagonist, and violence turns out to be the answer. But you can only win by enlisting the help of others.
The puzzles seemed to have the right difficulty. I consulted the hints twice, but in both cases I’m sure I would have found the solution with more perseverance; it’s just that during the competition, I’m in a bit of a rush since I want to complete a lot of games. (For the curious, I had somehow failed to examine the monkey droppings, and failed to realise that the glasses might be useful to the monkey.) And the game has a nice tone. Even when you are using the monkeys for your own purposes, it’s always clear that they are enjoying themselves. There are even a few Easter eggs hidden in the game, such as when you ask the statue to translate a piece of language you cannot logically have heard at that point in the game.
Enjoyable fare.
(I ran into one bug where ‘say hua’ while on the column with the baby monkey led to a series of programming error messages. But the game simply continued, so it wasn’t a big bother.)