Ali, thank you immensely for making such a charming, stylish game. The art was extremely consistent. The dialog was entertaining and obviously received a lot of love. Many lines were truly top knotch.
Since you asked, I'll offer some tiny nitpicks. But don't get me wrong, I loved this game and will be first in line if ever you should decide to release another. OK, on to the
List of hopefully constructive hypercritical feedbackOne tiny technical complaint is that some of the characters were antialiased into the background, but others (including those that walk) weren't.
Most puzzles had ample dialog and object descriptions surrounding them, and the solutions were very intuitive, however
I felt that the 'circumnavigate the world' puzzle could have been improved by some more dialog that reinforced the idea that the DLA members were nearly blind.
There were also a couple of moments when the game accidentally revealed future puzzle solutions:
In the first visit to Saul mine, Nelly's nonstandard response to "use heavy rock with pipe" tells the player the pipe will need to be smashed in the future even though there's no puzzle around it yet, in Bjorn and Olaffsen's, the iHook dialog implies that Nelly will need to obtain it even before the Hook-a-Duck stall opens, and on the tower rooftop it's possible for the player to smash the pipe open before deciding how it will be helpful, which tells the player that there will be a future use for the pipe.
Regarding the way the map was implemented: I liked being able to jump instantly between rooms, but I thought it was interesting that you didn't also provide walkable exits that lead to the map screen (as in the Monkey Island games).
I haven't heard the word 'derivative' used once. Shame on you!
I felt like the whole game was such a conscious homage that I wasn't overly bothered. It brought its own charmingly zany slant to the subject matter, and it had a well developed visual style. I'll be honest and say there were a few occasions when I felt ideas had been lifted a little too unaltered from other games:
The bar with different pirate themed mixed drinks, the "prove you are a pirate" puzzle, the pirate knick-knack shop complete with a pet bird, etc.
You treated the pirate theme excellently. I'd love to see a game by you in an all-new setting of your own design!
But enough hemming and hawing. I sound like a grumpy old man, but this game makes me feel like an excited five year old. Great work, way to follow through! Congratulations on a job well done!
