Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is a third-person adventure game where you are thrown into a 10-year-old mystery after you, Willy Morgan, receive a letter from your long lost father of 10 years telling you that something has gone wrong and, wouldn’t you know it, you need to go to Bone Town to figure it out. Developed by imaginarylab and published by LeonardoInteractive now comes to the Nintendo Switch on June 8th, 2021, after its initial PC/Steam release on August 11th 2020 to very positive reviews. Willy Morgan and the curse of Bone Town prides itself on its non-linear gameplay; once the game starts you can explore what you want and solve whatever puzzles you encounter along the way. This is very much a 90’s formula trying to resurface in an age where most gamers’ primary concern is graphics, time played and story.
As I mentioned, you start the game with a quick sequence of events that throws you right into solving the mystery of the note you received from your missing father. Let me say this, Willy doesn’t bat an eye at the fact he got a note from his missing father at all; he instantly heads to the location dictated on the note and doesn’t once question at all why his dad hadn’t reached out before or anything that a normal person would do. He just dives right into it no questions asked. You are given a tutorial on how to interact with the world at large, click everything, and fast travel which you will be using non-stop because who wants to walk back and forth when you can just teleport?
The world of Bone Town is inhabited by a whopping 15 NPCs, which you will interact with as you explore the town, the shops and homes are riddled with little Easter eggs such as Captain America’s shield sitting on a shelf while the blacksmith has Thor’s hammer sitting on the floor. The very pirate-like inhabitants of Bone Town seem out of place in a world of computers and science, their dialogue is pretty subpar and their jokes fall flat 99% of the time and don’t really push the game in any direction; they are just “alright”. Every interaction is just point and click so you can’t really divert from the story path too much, but there are a lot of clickable items and parts of the scenery that add humorous flavor to the experience..
Aside from the occasional cutscene every backdrop and location was a pre-rendered 3D picture that just kind of popped. The Aesthetics of Bone Town are wacky, a leaning Lighthouse across a ravine, most buildings are crooked in a way that just says, “something weird is going on”. To give credit where credit is due, never once did I enter a location and think, “bleh copy paste”; every location is detailed in a way that you can’t help but look at every part just to see if something is amiss, something you can use later on in one of the many puzzles Curse of Bone Town has to offer. Your character and the NPCs around Bone Town really stand out and the focus is on them when you see them in any area.
Speaking of puzzles, that is what you will spend much of your time doing while traversing the town…puzzles galore. Items can be in the weirdest locations, so I found myself clicking everything searching for something I might be able to use later in hopes of moving forward with the story. Lazy gamers can also hit a button to reveal all the interactive areas within a scene. The one part I notice people looking up solutions for, which I did end up doing, was bicycle pieces, one of which ended up being in a dream catcher I had to click on. A dream catcher was holding a bike piece, nobody said it had to make sense I guess; mind you this was one of the earliest puzzles and I’d already had to look it up due to just how uninviting it seemed.
At the end of the day Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is summed up simply as “alright”. It’s not mind blowing, nothing would ever have me replay it, but it was “alright” in visuals, story, humor you name it. Nothing jumped out at me; it just was what it was. With a total playtime of roughly 8-9 hours you can break it up into two days if you want but it’s doable in a single sitting or a long road trip. Fans of the genre will enjoy the classic 90’s style aesthetic and gameplay design, but with puzzles ranging from overly simplistic and sometimes too over the top, Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is unlikely to bring in new fans who might stumble upon this in the Nintendo store.
