This game is a charismatic grab-bag of various puzzle sub-games, with a family drama narrative driving it forward. You could think of it as an open-world Adventure game featuring the kinds of puzzles you'd find in the back pages of a newspaper, rather than the signature Adventure-genre "puzzles" design of "rub every inventory item on every character in order to progress". It's a very welcome evolution!
The majority of the puzzles are in the form of actual "paper" maps, which is incredibly novel, and the most interesting part is that all of them were created by the illiterate and ignorant pirate-folk that inhabit the isles, so were often missing the crucial pieces of information like "where do you use this map" or "what does this line mean?!" that presumably lived in the pirate's head before the map changed hands, and so you've got to try and figure that stuff out before you can finally use the map and dig up the bits of olden, golden pirate stuff. Sometimes you even have to break out the (in-game) ruler and compasses too, which is the only time I can remember doing that in a game outside of the boardgame Treasure Island (Paquien, 2018).
Some of the other puzzles are: Lock picking tetrinome ones. Various sliding/shifting tile puzzles. Mazes. Minecart routing/programming. Picross. Riddle sovling. Pattern spotting. Lots more, it feels like at least one each of Simon Tatham's puzzle pack is here. I think there's even a dialogue puzzle too. It's a constant stream of piratical problem solving and head scratching.
I was extremely impressed by the artwork. I really like the crystal-clear pixel art style used here. Yes, it's pixelated, but it's surprisingly non-retro. It's not trying to ape styles of the past, and it feels like a very modern use. The style is cartoony, and uses a lot of flat shading, which means everything is very visually clear when in motion and helps the islands feel real without being cluttered. It works really well in this kind of game and I'd like to see it used more in other games. The animations are great too, especially the interactions between the main character and his dog, as a lot of attention has gone into capturing the playfulness between them. Sometimes it can be a bit over the top, however, as I found the main walk style weird and flappy, and the idle/breathing animations (a bug bear of mine) look ridiculous when there's lots of characters on screen as they're all doing it in perfect lockstep, making such scenes look like some kind of cutlish dance routine.
Something else I appreciated about the graphics is that the developers seems to have taken great care in ensuring the integrity of the pixel grid. Not a single mixel is to be seen in this game, despite it constantly zooming in and out, and at one point (in the finale) it even has a pseudo perspective effect (in an otherwise isometric game) and never once does the character's outline alias, pop, shift, squiggle or in any way go wrong. It really helps sell the art style to see the technology try so hard to preserve it, so kudos for that.
Sound wise, the music was well done, though a tad derivative (as I'll mention later). The voice work never wore thin, despite being some kind of a derpy Sweden-gibberish instead of actual spoken words (think simlish), and the developer even went to lengths of having each character have a different type of "voice" providing the derp.
Also you've got a dog, and you can pet it, and it's got a skill tree, which I know are things lots of people will like. The dog is more than a pettable trinket, however, as he's often the component required to advance a lot of the puzzles, especially in the final dungeon. I wasn't a fan on continuously hugging the dog to upgrade it. Yes, it advanced just by running around and using it, but that was fairly slow, I never seemed to have the skills I wanted, when I wanted them, so I had to resort to excess good-boy cuddles. I never unlocked that siloed level 20 skill and couldn't imagine wasting the tie to do so. I'd prefer it if solving the puzzles with the dog helped advance the skill tree, as the current system felt like it held my character back, rather than helped him progress.
Finally, one thing I want to talk about is the overt Monkey Island references. Look, I understand. I'm a Monkey Island superfan as much as the next person who played the games repeatedly in the 90s, made their own AGS Adventure Games full of bad references and then spent the next decade spamming the various Monkey Island fansite forums. I imagine this is a large demographic I share.... but even *I* thought it was a bit overdone here. Yes, yes, I get it, Monkey Island is great. But maybe get your own thing, Mr Bilkins? Perhaps my superfan-status is making me see things that aren't there, and I'm just confusing two jocular Caribbean romps with one other, because there's only so many ways you can cartoonishy romp around the Caribbea, but it felt like nearly every aspect of the game had some kind of reference or joke duplication to the MI series here. The main sprite, some animations, the big trouser-filling inventory items, the second biggest things I've ever seen, the fourth wall breaks, the map ship and crew, the "I'm a good person" shtick whilst committing a constant serious of minor crimes and petty thefts all in the name of treasure hunting, the way some scenes are composed, etc. The biggest reference-crime is that the main developer (Mr Webbysoft) clearly said to the sound artists (Jamal Green, Heath Brown) "Please make me a legally distinct version of these famous Monkey Island tracks". Now don't get me wrong, Green knocked it out of the park: The music tracks are bangers and they totally invoke MI whilst also being nothing like MI. But it just feels a tad cheap. The immense talent of these developers could have been better spent on some wholly original ideas, with maybe one or two references, rather than the derivative ones on show.
Still, if you don't mind the MI references and like puzzle and logic games then it's well worth playing.
Some other nitpicking downsides to the game:
* There's far, far, far too much delay in the textual and cinematic animations. I wanted to be able to skip through them, the same way I can skip through the dialogue. It's the only thing I tangibly dislike about the game, really. It just makes the whole thing drag, rather than flow. This is especially true when digging, which you'll sometimes have to do a lot.
* Catching bait to then lose it is tedious. It meant I didn't engage with the fishing game as much as I'd like.
* The dog kept getting stuck, as the game is a bit inconsistent about when it does and doesn't take him with you on scene transitions and fast travel. As long as he's by your side it's ok, but snapping him out of commands and into the follow state seemed hit and miss, so you'd have to spam it a few times.
* I played on hard, which meant no hints, but I suspect even on medium you don't get hints for the tetrinomo puzzles, so I uses a GameFaqs guide which game some hints. I didn't really want to spent hours trying *every* combination of shapes. Yes, there are skeleton keys to skip, but you only get 3 of those and what happens if the later puzzles are harder than these?! (As you can imagine I ended the game with all 3 unused)
* I think it was a tiny bit too long, just started to wear out it's welcome. I didn't even 100% it, as I couldn't solve the graveyard riddles and I couldn't be bothered with the fishing. Not sure what I'd cut though. Maybe some of the tetrinomo puzzles and booty therein?
* The map's rotate feature was entirely pointless, from what I remember, despite the UI prompt making me think it would be used continuously, except for that *one* puzzle that used it.
