Willy Morgan & The Curse of Bone Town Switch Review – A Mysterious Point & Click Adventure
10 years ago, Willy Morgan’s dad Henry went missing. One day, while his mother Mother is in the Amazon on some kind of an expedition, Willy gets a letter seemingly from his father, asking him to head to nearby Bone Town. An old, run down town that’s shrouded in mystery, Bone Town is filled with ominous characters and a dark history that is coincidentally the last place Willy’s dad had been seen before he vanished without a trace.
So is Willy Morgan & The Curse of Bone Town a narrative point-and-click adventure for you to enjoy? Or does Bone Town need to be avoided like the plague?
To start, you get an optional tutorial to teach you the basics of controls and the layouts. Then you get a taste of what is to come, as you walk around Willy’s house attempting to repair his bicycle in order to begin the trip to his destination where the real fun begins.
Essentially, Willy Morgan & The Curse of Bone Town is a point-and-click adventure game, not unlike Deponia or Sam & Max. You search for items and clues to advance the story, while also needing to find combinations of items and identifying when to use them. It’s all rather simple to work out the basics, though the puzzles may take a mixture of skill and sheer guesswork to solve.
Thankfully, there is a button you can press that will reveal all the things you can interact with in a room, and it makes it a little less difficult to spot certain things you might otherwise miss if you don’t consider yourself particularly observant. The other quality of life feature is a fast-travel feature, allowing you to revisit places on the map without having to walk from screen to screen to get from one end of the map to another. These days, any game without offensive animations is a welcome sight.
The characters in the game aren’t super fleshed out, though given the length of the story that doesn’t cause any issues. As a matter of fact, it does quite the opposite. It becomes clear pretty early that there are some suspicious characters around the town, and learning only small amounts of information about each character leaves you trying to guess who might be the antagonist of the story, who is a character who appears faceless in cutscenes, and who is merely a bystander.
On the topic of cutscenes, the ones featured in Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town are charming. A logical upgrade to similar games I played back in the Nintendo Wii era (Back to the Future being one of them), the cutscenes look nice and will honestly look just as nice a decade from now to anyone who decides to revisit the game then. The entire game is graphically nice, in fact. Cartoony enough to where it will never date harshly or go out of style.
Another plus for this game is that the music is low key and atmospheric enough to never get annoying despite being repetitive. The mood is set perfectly by the tunes, and if you were to play this game during the upcoming Halloween season, you’d be well and truly getting into the spirit!
The characters are all fully voice acted, which is a plus for any game. I’m someone who loves games to be fully voiced even if the actors aren’t very good, but the developers of Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town found some actors who have styles that fit the game perfectly.
If you go into the game blind, I can easily see it taking a few hours to complete. It took me around 4 hours to get through the game the first time, though I’m not usually super-great at figuring these types of puzzle games out. On a second playthrough, or with a guide, I imagine you could finish in well under two hours.
As for bugs, I learned the hard way that there is no auto-save, so when my game crashed as I was heading toward the end of the game and I hadn’t saved since shortly after the tutorial, that was a major bummer. I don’t know what caused the crash, and it never happened again, so I’ll assume it was a one-off thing. Nothing too serious, but do remember to save your game, just in case.
A cozy and well crafted game, Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town justifies its price tag through its quality. The graphics are lovely, the audio is neat, the gameplay is simple, the puzzles are challenging, and the story is certainly fun.
I’ll admit I didn’t see the ending coming, but instead of spoiling it, I’ll recommend you purchase the game and find out for yourself. It’s worth it, believe me!
Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town review provided by Nintendo Link
Developer: VLG
Publisher: LeonardoInteractive
Release Date: June 8, 2021
Price: $24.99, £22.49, 24,99€
Game Size: 1.6GB
Charming graphics
Good voice acting
Interesting story
Might feel a little short for veterans of the genre
