The Legend of Kyrandia: Malcolm's Revenge (Book Three)

I'm happy to say that the Kyrandia series ended on a high note. Classic point-and-click game goodness, plus the "alignment" system is a very nice addition and the humor is incredible, Malcom himself is the main source of jokes and his wit is on par with Manny and Guybrush. The 3D background graphics are pretty poor, but tolerable given when this game was made. Some of the puzzles are VERY frustrating and slow down the game. HOWEVER, I think everyone is overreacting to them; especially since similarly inane and annoying puzzles plagued the previous Kyrandia games. Still, the middle puzzle that people have been referencing is quite awful, its the only thing keeping me from giving this game a 5 out of 5. While it is far from perfect, I can say with confidence Malcom's Revenge is as good as the previous Kyrandia games (if not better). I'd also like to note that most of the negative reviews for Malcom's Revenge seem to be out of nostalgia for the first two games, I recommend disregarding most reviews 3 stars or less.

Many people hate the third one, but I love it. The thing I love the most about it was that there were multiple ways of coming from A to B (though mostly in the first part of the game). And I REALLY LOVED this. In the other two Kyrandia games, though awesome, I really hated that you could only do the game in one particular way: namely only the one way the game designer had decided. In this way this game was a little like Maniac Mansion, another great adventure game. It also had multiple ways of doing things, in accordance to the choices in the start of the game. For example there are at least 4 ways of getting to the island of cats (2 potion way and 2 ship ways). That just makes the replay value that more awesome. I have played this for almost 10 years, and I still find new things. That is why I love it. But taste in games are of course subjective.

This game is awesome. Yes, it is not as pretty to look at as the other ones. This pre-rendered 3D graphics... yuck! Yes, the puzzle in the middle of the game stinks. But you know what makes this game so awesome? It's Malcolm. He is the bad guy with a golden heart, a mischief maker with an overweight bad conscience. I love this game just for him. It gives the whole series another twist. Now you know, that Kallak is a dick, Brandon is a dimwitted dope and that Malcolm is the true hero. Great humor!

I actually have some fondness for this game - as a kid, I tried and failed many times to get this game to run on the family PC. When it eventually did work, I must have spent hours exploring the first area, trying to figure out how the heck anything works. Playing it now, it's no surprise I never made progress in this game - the puzzle logic is about as far-fetched as can be. The solutions often seem to be complete non-sequitors (to the point you start to wonder if the game bugged out). Two frustrating design sins appear constantly: randomization and repetition. Through every part of the game, key puzzle solutions involve randomized elements: searching the dump *may* give you something useful, maybe not. Giving an item to a character *may* grant an important item, maybe not. You can easily cheese this with the save/load system, but even then, it took me 30-40 loads in one case to get past the randomization...can you imagine solving this as intended!? Again and again, the solution is to do the same thing a ton of times until you make progress. As you solve puzzles, it just gets more bewildering. How and why anything is happening is just completely unclear. Enter a cave, an avant-garde video clip plays, suddenly you're somewhere else. Whiff a "magic can" to just go places for reasons. Make plants grow by using sea creatures on them. Just whatever! And, of course, there's a maze thrown in there. And you have to navigate it twice. I actually don't think the graphics are as bad as others have mentioned, but they're not awesome. It probably seemed very bleeding edge at the time, but hasn't aged super well. Certainly the previous game's graphics were better. Bringing back the villain from the first game as the hero is a fun idea, and Malcolm is a great character. The dialogue and scenarios are sometimes pretty funny. But the story just goes nowhere - part of the puzzle is understanding why in the world you are doing anything this game wants you to do.