Four Fat Chicks -- Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths Review

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths

Review by Jen

While the world watches and waits and speculates about the prospects of a Monkey Island 4 and bemoans the lack of LucasArts adventure releases, a little-known Italian company is poised to fill the void with a good old-fashioned, point-and-click, 2D comic adventure game, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths. Tony Tough is rumored to have been released in Italy, in the Italian language, already but I can't find it online anywhere. I had the opportunity to play a nearly full-length demo of the game, with Italian voices and English subtitles.

Tony Tough is a short, portly Milquetoast-type private detective who works for a gigantic detective agency—but his office is in the dank basement. As the game opens, we see him as a child, sitting in his window on Halloween, eating his candy. His hell-spawn next-door neighbor sling-shoots a pebble at Tony, knocking him down and setting off a chain reaction that results in a jack-o-lantern falling on the neighbor boy's head, from whence he can't remove it. Time passes; now man Tony's mission is to catch the pumpkin-headed being who steals children's Halloween candy every year. It is Halloween again, and Tony has not been successful, but he knows this is the year he's finally going to solve the case and put an end to the "alien's" depredations.

Tony starts out with a sidekick, his "dog" cum purple tapir, Pantagruel. Pantagruel is kidnaped, and Tony receives a note telling him to go to Halloween Park (a sort of a permanent carnival, a no-budget Disneyland if you will) if he ever wants to see Pantagruel again. ("Pantagruel" is not half as much fun to type over and over again as it is to hear in Italian.) First Tony must find his way out of his office building, and then he must find his way into the park, and after that the game's afoot. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of plot to the game—the characters and locations and inventory items mainly serve as vehicles for comedy and puzzles.

And comedy and puzzles there are—by the boatload. This game is very obviously patterned after the earlier LucasArts games—in fact, there are numerous references to LucasArts classics throughout Tony Tough. The comedy was actually pretty funny, even through the subtitles. (Whoever did the translations did a fantastic job.)

The puzzles are mostly of the find-odd-inventory-items-and-use-them-in-creative-ways that we LucasArts fans are all so familiar with. Since at the time I played, there was no walkthrough available, I actually had to figure out the puzzles all by my lonesome. And let me tell you, that was no easy feat. Due to the ready availability of hints and walkthroughs on the Internet, my brain has turned to mush when it comes to solving these things. But I got way more satisfaction knowing that I beat the game without any help than I've had from a game in a long time.

The interface is point-and-click—you right-click on an object to bring up verb choices—examine, use, take, or talk. The inventory comes up from the bottom of the screen when you move your mouse down thataway, and to use an item, you select it and click it on whatever you want to use it on. Also, you can examine an item, use it on yourself, or talk to it, although that last never bore any fruit for me. The save, restore, and options can all be brought up by hitting the escape key.

The graphics are 2D. Yes, you heard me, in the year 2000 some company actually had the gall to release a 2D adventure game. You don't even need a very fancy computer to play it, and your video card will lie fallow. Imagine! The noive! Actually, I really liked the look of the game—PROtonic can definitely run with the big dogs with the quality of this release.

The music changes with each location, but the game is so hard that the music got on my nerves when I had to hear each snippet 6,000 times over the course of the game. But I did enjoy it at first. The sound effects are very squelchy and suit the game to a tee. I can't comment on the voice acting because I don't speaka da Italian, but like I said above, the English subtitle translations were very well-done.

I know there are some people who don't much care for 2D, cartoony, third-person, point-and-click inventory fests with grade-school toilet humor galore ... but I'm not one of them. I think it is refreshing to see a company take a chance on a genre and format that's been pronounced dead and do such a fine job.