The Adventures of the Black Hawk review

• Reviews by Beau
• Published:

Robs liberally from the classics but gives back an amusing, old-fashioned pixel art adventure in its own right

The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis are two of the most beloved adventures games out there, and many indie designers have paid homage to them over the past twenty years. Croqueta Asesina, a new studio hailing from Málaga, Spain, takes it one step further with their first game by writing what is essentially a gushing love letter to the LucasArts favorites. The Adventures of the Black Hawk is so much like these games that at first one could be convinced they were playing a long lost LucasArts title, at least for a little while. That illusion doesn’t last, as Black Hawk contains several missteps that prevent it from being considered a must play by the fans the game was made for, but there is much to like here, including an amusing script, silly characters, and fun puzzles.

When loading the game, you are presented with a classic copyright protection question, requiring you to reference the game’s old-fashioned-looking (though digital) manual. While this exercise succeeds in starting the nostalgia wave (and includes a funny, admonishment-filled cutscene should you fail), it becomes wearisome on repeated plays, especially for Steam Deck players who don’t have an easy way to click back to the manual.

The Black Hawk is a Robin Hood-type character from the late 18th century, who is a well-respected aristocrat named Jean Pierre de Saint-Cove hiding behind a mask to aid the French proletariat by sabotaging the elite. The game begins in true LucasArts fashion, with a lengthy intro that sees the Black Hawk fail to rob the carriage of the Lord Marquis, before glumly talking to the camera. After you’ve witnessed a plan concocted by the lord and his chief of police to catch the Black Hawk, you will take control of our hero in his ongoing quest to overthrow the Old Regime.  

Not surprisingly, gameplay is identical to the LucasArts SCUMM classics. Each scene is nicely detailed in its pixelated glory, many scrolling as you move to the west or east ends of the screen. The same list of nine verbs is displayed on the bottom left, and can be used in combination with your inventory or with the scene. Pictures of your inventory are on the bottom right, and similarly can be used in the scene or with each other to create new items. There are no modern conveniences such as hotspot highlighters or in-game hints, though when you hover over a clickable sprite, the default verb is highlighted, which you can initiate with a right click. 

Conversations will also be familiar, with dialogue trees to exhaust and the occasional well-drawn (though static) close-up portraits that provide a more intimate experience. A highlight is the rude responses you can choose when speaking with your fellow aristocrats, as Jean Pierre will instead reply with the most ingratiating words possible. Lines of dialogue are even borrowed straight from Monkey Island, including some of the famous sword fighting insults. Nearly every conversation is riddled with innuendo and snark.  

Even though the game takes place in France, it feels as though Guybrush’s Caribbean is not far away, with filthy bars serving questionable grog, swashbuckling pirates, and tough redheaded maidens with a soft spot for said buccaneers. In fact, it seems like the only obvious difference in settings is that no one in these parts is selling any fine leather jackets.

The Adventures of the Black Hawk

Genre:	Adventure, Comedy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Historical
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Action:	Combat
Difficulty:	Medium

The plot, thankfully, carves out its own path. Jean Pierre must make friends among the common folk, flirt with the bourgeoisie to learn secrets, discover a secret underground movement that shares common goals, and hatch plans to dismantle the local government. Somewhat unexpected plot twists shake things up, and most delightfully you will also sometimes play as Jean Pierre’s love interest Violette Hulot. While there are no cooperative puzzles and you only switch heroes at designated times, it’s still a welcome change of pace. Violette views the world differently, and as such will pick up items that Jean Pierre showed disinterest in. And while Jean Pierre tends to approach things cleverly, Violet tends to crack nuts with a sledgehammer.

Unlike Monkey Island, there are a few actual real-time fight scenes to muddle through. They’re fairly simple, with just a few keys used to move laterally and block and thrust vertically. But while I said simple, this should not be mistaken for elegant. It’s hard to react quickly enough to parry an attack. Although brief pauses must be taken due to a quickly depleting stamina bar, I found it more effective to bum rush the opponent with the same type of thrust repeatedly rather than focus on defense. Should you be vanquished, you will be sent back to the home screen. But since the game manual warns you this can happen, you’ll be saving on the regular. 

The puzzles are generally goofy and challenging. The first one involves trying to concoct a particular recipe to help bypass some very hungry guards. Along the way you’ll also have to bribe a priest, MacGyver random items into a bread pan, win a carnival dart game, and find a dozen sundry ingredients to make the world’s strongest fire grog. Like the classics, there is a significant amount of item hunting to do, though none of it feels unfair. But also like the classics, some of the puzzles themselves feel arbitrary or confusing. In one case the verb “open” is required, when “use” should have worked just fine. One puzzle requires feeding a dog, but only one of several available foods is the correct one, as if dogs won’t eat literally anything. Other puzzles also deserve multiple solutions, or at least proper feedback when a reasonable solution is attempted; I sought out a few hints throughout my playthrough and most of the time I did not regret it.

Another gripe is that a few puzzles require getting an item or performing a task for another character. While these kinds of fetch quests are acceptable in such a goofy adventure, it is often the case that unless you take copious notes, you might forget what the character even wanted in the first place, as the relevant dialogue may only only accessible once, with no kind of notebook to help you keep track. Given that sometimes dialogue hints do remain available when revisiting a conversation, I felt tricked into a false sense of security with my lack of note-taking. 

The pixel art graphics generally are up to par with their inspiration. Every scene is colorful and well-detailed, from the grody aforementioned saloon, to the cartoonishly opulent castle, and the incongruently located carnival. The animation will also bring back memories, as characters often wildly gesticulate. While picking up and using items is often simply a hand gesture, most significant actions like pushing an object, throwing a dart, and swordplay are clearly depicted. The music and sound, on the other hand, is disappointingly bland. There are several unmemorable synthesized tracks, and the too sparse sound effects are generally not convincing.

There are also a few quality-of-life issues. Most prominent is inconsistent English localization. While the translators did an excellent job of capturing the appropriate sarcasm and enthusiasm of the script, there are so many grammar and spelling mistakes.  Some just seem like typos (“Mushrooms grow in dump places” or “it’s a little too son for that”), while others are jarring conjugation mistakes. There’s even one missed translation, where “y” remains in place for the word “and.” It never impacted my ability to understand the script, but it took me out of the moment several times. 

A more minor concern is the system for saving and restoring games. There are ten slots, which is generally okay since there is only one path through the game and only a few places where you can kick the bucket.  But rather than have you type in the name of your save file, the game simply captures an almost indistinguishable screenshot of your current location along with the current date. If you saved your progress several times in one day, and you come back a few days later, good luck remembering which is your most recent save.

Final Verdict

To be clear, I have no qualms about The Adventures of the Black Hawk being a copycat adventure. Not only is it comfortably familiar, but it’s comfortably enjoyable. There’s a reason the LucasArts catalog holds up well today. While I never laughed out loud while playing, I smirked several dozen times, an impressive feat on its own, even more so given the jokes were first written in Spanish. The puzzles, while occasionally frustrating, still deserve praise for their irreverence and general cleverness. While I said at the outset that this isn’t a must-play game, fans of the early LucasArts adventures will surely still have a good time for the eight to twelve hours it will take. There’s a lot of talent and heart on display here, and I sincerely hope Croqueta Asesina is able to parlay this into future adventures with a bigger budget to add the extra polish needed to compete with the classics they seek to emulate.

Beau played The Adventures of the Black Hawk on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher. 

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