Reviewed: December 20, 2002
Reviewed by: Aaron Daigle
Publisher
Got Game Entertainment
Developer
Prograph Research
Released: November 1, 2002
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
7
9
9
7
8.8
System Requirements
Recommended System
When’s the last time you threw on a yellow trench coat and pursued candy copping space aliens on Halloween? That’s just one of the unique experiences that ProGraph Research serves up with the recently released Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths. The game thrusts you in to the role of Anthony Tough, Privet Investigator, who has been unsuccessfully investigating the same case for ten years. It’s a convoluted journey through purple tapir kidnappings, cross-dressing and run-ins with a cast of zany characters that in the end winds up being a very satisfying adventure indeed.
It’s been a while since a fresh 2D adventure game hit the PC market, the last stand out probably being the Curse of Monkey Island by legendary adventure developer Lucasarts. Of late there have been several notable 3D titles released including Syberia, Alice and Grim Fandango, but the two dimensional side of things has been, well, flat. Tony Tough has humor, tough puzzles and a solid story that should provide just the fix that point and click adventure gamers are looking for.
Tony Tough’s user interface is simple and works very well. The clicking the left mouse button moves Tony wherever the curser is pointing and makes menu and inventory selections. The right mouse button opens the investigation menu, which allows Tony to examine, use, take and talk to various people and things during his search. The inventory can be accessed by hovering the cursor over the bottom of the screen and allows you to access any items that are acquired during Tony’s investigation. Some items need to be combined with others before they are useful and this menu is where that happens.
Overall the streamlined control setup of Tony Tough works better than you might expect as it eliminates the need to use the keyboard shortcuts that are common in other adventure titles. Occasionally it does feel like the curser is lagging slightly, but on the whole, things run smoothly.
The game’s plot is progressed by interacting with all the wacky NPCs and the game’s off the wall environments. As with most adventure titles, when talking to someone Tony is presented with three or four lines of conversation that he can pursue. Some of these threads of inquiry reveal clues that progress the story, some don’t really lead anywhere while others result in random hilarity. While the game’s characters do help to move the story along, many of the game’s challenges involve solving puzzles.
The manual states that there are clues that lead to the puzzles’ solutions, but there didn’t appear to be any clear hints. During the writing of this review most of the puzzles were brute-forced through trial and error. Puzzles are important to games in the adventure genre. They should be well integrated into the game environment, entertaining and most importantly, challenging but not frustrating. The third puzzle quality is where Tony Tough stumbles a bit, most of the game’s puzzles are just not intuitive nor are they easily solved and few things suck the fun out of a game like getting stuck.
The only major problem Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths has is the lack of any text labels in the options menu. Basically you have to read the manual in order to figure out what each menu and selection does. As the option menu is the first thing many gamers check, this shortcoming has the potential to deter some from investing any serious time in this excellent game.
While the graphical style used in Tony Tough could be called “retro,” that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t look good. Almost all of the character designs are caricatured to some degree and they are all detailed and well drawn and animated. The backgrounds and foregrounds are frequently animated and as a rule entertain the eye and look sharp. The visual style of this game, while cartoon-ish, does convey depth very well and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see more adventure titles utilizing the 2D style that was so successfully applied here.
Gamers far and wide have come to expect at least some voice acting in games of most genres. Most of the time when compared to movies or TV, the voice work in games is mediocre to “Oh-my-god-please-tie-me-to-a-chair-and-light-my-eyebrows-on-fire-just-make-it-stop” bad. For that reason it’s nice every once and a while to see a game that gets it right. The folks at Audiogodz deserve the maddest of mad props for creating the voices that so perfectly fit the game’s cast. While the title character’s speech is rendered as a nasally whine, it somehow manages to avoid becoming at all annoying. Most games have at least one character that isn’t up to snuff, but here that isn’t the case at all.
There is one aspect of Tony Tough that stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the game and that is the almost muted quality of the music and sound effects. While it’s good that the music doesn’t blare over the sound effects and speech, there are places, like the carnival, where the music could have helped contribute to the atmosphere of the game if it had more of a presence. While not as pronounced as the music issue, Tony Tough’s sound effects seem inconsistent at times. Not that it would be desirable to hear a slide whistle going off every two minutes, but as silly as the game is, a slightly more humorous would fit well and perhaps even add a few more chuckles to Tony’s journey.
At under $30 Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths is a lot of bang for the buck. While it doesn’t have anything in the way of extras, it is the one of the most entertaining adventure titles to come along in a while and is definitely worth a little more than a week of your time.
Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted moths should be a pleasing experience for almost any one that gives it a try. The game boasts both a great cast and story and even though some of the puzzles are a tad to difficult, the overall experience is highly enjoyable. ProGraph does seem to have set things up for a sequel and that is definitely a good thing. If they keep turning out titles of this caliber, they will be in the same class as Lucasarts in no time.