This is not just a review on this particular game, but a comentary on the entire series and an issue that needs to be adress and has being ignored for two long.
For anyone unaware, Mortadelo and Filemón (Mort and Phil or Clever and Smart as they are wrongly called internationally) are part of an elite of characters from European comicbooks that specially in the 90s had a big explosure of new material and reprintings of older ones... Tintín, Asterix and Obelix, the Smurfs, Spirou, Werner, Gaston Lagaffe, Martin Mystere, Corto Maltese and many, many more. All this characters had tons of success not just in their country, but all over Europe, and sometimes we Europeans are to blame for mistreating their legacy with cheat and bad products.
This games, as whole, the 4 of them (yes only, 4, more on that later) are a mix bag. They do present well the comicbook humor and settings, but they are a bit obscure with their puzzles and they are buggy games. That being said, for anyone who likes this characters and likes the PnC adventure, they are Ok-ish and they are part of a lot of people´s childhood memories, even from people not from Spain since some of the games initially were also subbed to german or italian. And that´s when one of the first issues comes to the front: the Steam version it´s Spanish only, no dub, no sub. Thus they are 100% limitting the possibilties of these games by denying anyone who is not from Spain to enjoy them, not even people from South America could, because Mortadelo and Filemón´s speech patterns are deeply rooted into 90s central Spain speech patterns that tons of jokes would be lost. And while this is the nature of most of the European comicbook characters I was mentioning before, specially those from comedy books since they were basically working on in-jokes about their own nationality, they are not improving it by denying something as simply as allow fan translations to be made and added into the games, so more people could enjoy them.
And then, it´s the issue of the number of games. Anyone who is not from Spain, and lived during the period when Alcachofa Soft shifted their model will have a very hard time understading how this works. This games are only 4 of them, but they were all sepparated into 2 parts, thus when they announced "remasters" of 6 games, what they meant is "we are gonna put on sale the half parts of games you could already own on Steam and we have not updated or fixxed in years"... Yeah, scummy it´s even too much of a soft word to describe what is happening here.
All in all, this whole situation can only harm an IP that after the passing of it´s creator and the making of two fantastic live action movies (for reals, go watch them even if you don´t know the characters or much about Spanish history, they are waaaayyy better than those gazillion Astetix movies) has become dormant, alongside many more of those classic European comicbook characters and stripes. In some European countries 20 year olds no longer recognize the characters from their own nation, and there was at least one per Euyropean country. The less we could do is try make the few instances they still emerge, to be at pair with the quality associated with the IP.
This is not a bad game, it´s meh for sure, but this threatment and lack of love for the property is hurting. Add at least subs for Portuguese, German, English and Italian. Stop reselling half a game trying to make a profit that won´t come because we are literally less than 100 people buying this games right now. Stop using the word "remaster" when you are launching a 2023 game with the quality of a 1996 floppy. Do all those things, or simply leave the IP along, cause you are klilling it, and Mortadelo and Filemón deserve so much more than this.
