No Gold for Brigands

No Gold for Brigands has an enjoyability to it that I cannot really explain, but I didn't see those 1-2 hours go by.

If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I might undersell its appeal: it's a comedy puzzle game with a catgirl and pirates, and it's very rough in a lot of respects.

But it is fun.
This game has the right kind of comedy world: those that have an undeniable, although very silly, logic to them. Or perhaps not logic, but something like consistency, I guess.

In this world, children are utter pricks, pirates are jovially murderous or murderously jovial, and everyone is rather mean toward the protagonist, but that's okay because she is a terrible anthropomorphic being too.

In this world, there are puzzles everywhere because some guy insists on designing them and leaving them around.
The guy has a name, and that name is Bernard Steven Fitzgerald the Fifth.
You actually meet him at some point.


This elf doesn't lose much of her mystery. Most mysteriously, she actually doesn't go speak with BSF 5 at all, she just goes in the backroom and stands there and never mentions it again. I think she's hoping we'll just forget about it.


Said puzzles are overflowing with gold and weird relics that you can sell afterward, but the sole purpose of this money is to purchase minigames (even the manual explaining how to play them has to be bought).
Not sure how their economy works, but hey, that still makes more sense than most financial products.


Yup, that's what we do!


Also, the narrator's a jerk, and there is pie.



Story and writing: 3.5/5 Come for the puzzles, stay for the laughs

This may sound strange for a puzzle game, but the writing is definitely the best part here. And by writing I mean humor.
Do not come looking for eloquence, ponderous drama, or even decent spelling and grammar. This is silly writing, delivered in a very brusque manner.

But I did laugh repeatedly, though a bit incredulously at first. The matter-of-fact, rapid-fire delivery would have been terrible in a more dramatic piece, but it gives a deadpan tone to the wackiness that worked excellently on me.
Even the numerous gags I could see coming from miles away felt homey, like a comfy old sofa. Sure, it was a bit hit-and-miss at times, especially the very first scene, but the cheerful carelessness of it all saved it from feeling overdone.

I rarely approve of games that force you to talk to everyone repeatedly, but here it was no chore - it was actually fun to see micro-vignettes of the townspeople life. And to gain deeper psychological insight into the pirate crew. No, not really, they're just there for throwaway lines, and we love them for that.


Adventure, mystery and discrete, never-commented-upon, particularly dubious undertones of romance! Also typos. Typos everywhere.

Highlights: Discussions about Amos (especially in the light of having just played The Book of True Will, another puzzle game - involuntary parallels are best parallels), the burial, Captain, the general carelessness of the world.


Gameplay: 3/5 The seeds of something good

As a pure puzzle game, this would be a bit barebones: the puzzles come and go almost as fast as the gags. While most offer little in terms of challenge, they are also neither frustrating nor boring. Well, except the optional puzzle, which is a maze (I hate mazes) with a timer that's just there to artifically prolong it. But if you stumble upon that fisrt as I did, don't let it stop you, because the puzzles in the "main storyline" are decently enjoyable, while clearly underdeveloped.

There are actually a couple of ideas that I found interesting: each puzzle has a central element which can always be used in at least two different ways, and this simple innovation occasionally proves very refreshing. For instance, you have the infamous Puzzle Where You Push Boulders, except that here you can also pick them up and throw them further away, and both pushing and throwing prove advantageous in different conditions. The last puzzle on the ship is a brilliant example of this, and perhaps the only moment where I had to pause and think, and thus ended up with a proper "aha" moment. The final puzzle sequence with flamethrowers is a bit underwhelming after that.

I'm not very much into puzzles in general so I was grateful for being able to breeze through most of these, but I could see ingredients with a lot of potential here, which really deserve to be turned into something grander.

All these puzzles provide you with money and relics, which can be spent only on minigames. If I am not mistaken, the minigames are direct implementations of preexisting scripts, a lot of them by Galv (who also made a pirate treasure hunter game, coincidence? well I didn't play that one so I cannot comment), and they ended up feeling quite disconnected from the rest, so I cannot really give points for that.

Also: don't play the Pong minigame, it is extremely long and then it crashes, which was perhaps the only unpleasant moment in the entire game.

Aesthetics: 2.5/5 Decent RTP fare

I cannot say much about the graphics and music - the mapping effort was sufficient, and sure those busts are pretty, but everything is taken from standard resource packs and used in a rather straightforward way, with quite little room for creativity. Definitely not the game's high point, and there is also very little of it.


This sums up the game's purpose.


Total: 3.5/5
It was a difficult rating to give, but for Christmas time I decided to go with the heart rather than the brain.

Taken separately, each aspect of this game has lots of room for improvement, and perhaps the score should be lower and leave more headspace for future progress.

Yet somehow I actually had fun. The cartoonish, candid awkwardness of the characters and of the universe's workings, coupled with the game's very fast pace, ensure that there is no downtime. There are many worse ways to make a small break from serious gaming during the holidays.