February 2, 2015

Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria

Prelusion, 2001


Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria is a traditional point and click cartoon adventure with tongue-in-cheek background graphics and cheap humor stuffed in every location as a failed attempt to make it a funny game. All the characters represents a humorous approach in the story, which starts with an excellent animated introduction.

Many years ago, an evil wizard called Karn was defeated by a lunatic young lad from Phungoria with the help of a huge mushroom that came in his hand while trying to save himself from Karn's attack and killed him back by hitting the mushroom on his head. To this day, that legendary mushroom has been placed in the town square and every year a citizen has been elected to take care of the mushroom. You play as young Gilbert, whose uncle is elected this year to take care of the mushroom and one morning while you are watching him taking care of the mushroom through the telescope, you see someone with a covered face hits your uncle on his head with a huge mallet and steals the Mushroom. The town sheriff arrests your uncle and the people of the town want him to be executed at once. Now, it is your quest to earn enough time by finding a way to delay your uncle's execution so you can go on the trail of the mushroom thief and retrieve the mushroom to prove your uncle innocent. As you venture you unravel a horrible plot to resurrect the dead evil wizard Karn using the legendary mushroom in a ritual. Your quest takes you to many colorful locations, meet and interact with many funny characters and finally defeat the mushroom thief and once again save the town and your uncle.

The game displays excellent quality hand-painted graphics with a medieval touch. Multiple choice dialogues allows the player to interact with game characters that provides clues and hints to solve puzzles, which are mostly solved by using different inventory items and collecting them is marred by down to bottom level of pixel hunting. Sound and Music value quite good, which also include quality voice-acting. In my opinion, adventure games must have a compelling story with related puzzles and solving them bring the player to a smooth and relevant ending but sorry to say that none of these are covered in this game, which binds me to give this game an average 5/10 score.