Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths Preview

Well, this is an adventure I sure hope to play this year. I say I hope to, as all the less-known games (and especially adventure games originating from non-English-speaking countries) tend not to get published in the States. I certainly hope this is not going to be the case here, because judging from the playable demo I had a chance to play, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths might really look good once it's finished, as it resembles some older Sierra / Lucas Arts games...

The Italian-based Prograph Research (formerly known as Protonic Interactive) gives us the story of Tony Tough - a tough man with a tough job: he works as a private eye for Wallen & Wallen Investigations. On the other hand, this Leisure Suit Larry look-alike, with a way too big raincoat and enormous glasses, certainly doesn't look like someone who is capable of intimidating anyone. He's been a private eye for ten years now, and finally, he got an assignment worth risking his neck... He has to catch a swollen headed psychopath who keeps stealing candy from children. This doesn't seem too dangerous, but Tony thinks otherwise: "I'll save their lives! A candy today, the whole Planet tomorrow." And this tomorrow is never to come as our hero plans to thwart the villain's evil plans tonight, on Halloween.

But alas, he barely even stepped out of his office, and his faithful assistant Pentagruel, the dog has gone missing. OK, by now you got the idea that Tony isn't the only funny thing around this game. There definitely is not that much pink dogs, monkeys or whatevers going about in jeans and chewing on chewing gum. You can claim that this is a game for kids for all you like, but I still have to say I enjoyed it. It wasn't the styling, though; I mostly liked the humorous situations.

Visually, the game is completely in 2D, and has a very becoming comic-book outlook. The design highly resembles Leisure Suit Larry V, Day of The Tentacle, Willy Beamish and similar games... Even though everything is in 640x480 the graphics and especially backgrounds look great. The only downside there, are the animated sprites... I didn't like how the characters were animated, and the hero of the game should definitely have been done far better. There is also too much of a contrast between the characters and backgrounds, as the characters look somehow too jagged, they have no antialiasing... I do believe that this will be corrected in the final version of the game.

The interface looks OK... it mostly resembles the system introduced by Full Throttle, and later used in The Curse of Monkey Island: right-clicking on an object on screen will open a menu with four possible actions: Look, Take, Talk and Use. I feel this is the best possible solution for an adventure game, standing somewhere in-between over-elaborate interfaces of the old games, and idiotically simplified lacks of interfaces in Grim Fandango and its clones. The only flaw here was that the relatively large "pop-up" menu contains relatively small and ambiguous icons, but once you get used to them, you'll be OK.

If we disregard this little flaw, everything else about the interface is perfect, and quite customizable... you can determine where you want your inventory to be on screen and so on... The conversation interface might also have been designed a bit better, as it takes literally half of the screen.

Unfortunately, I couldn't really get a clear picture as to what the puzzles will look like from the demo. The first couple of minutes mostly came down to collecting items, combining them and having several not too important conversations. The full version is supposed to have some sixty locations, thirty interactive characters, a lot of puzzles. And, we shouldn't forget the fact that the game won't be totally linear, which might give it a long-lasting replay value.

There you have it... This preview may have seemed as if I didn't go nuts over this game, but one thing I can tell you is that when Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths appears, I'm gonna be the first to play it...