Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria

The Good
Maybe I was in the mood for a bright and cheery adventure. After all, I had grown tired of dark and surrealistic games lately. Whatever it was, this game was just what the doctor ordered. The humor in Gilbert Goodmate is cute and refreshingly original (sometimes sarcastic).

The game ships on two CD-Roms and files are pulled from both during the installation, possibly as part of a copy-protection scheme. You can choose to install the minimum number of files, medium or a full install. I chose the Medium installation and never had problems with performance. (I did install both patches before playing, however.)

The interface is very user friendly, and some of it is a bit different than other games I've played. Left click on someone or some thing and a cute face pops up with options like Look, Talk or Use, depending upon the person or thing you are pointed at. A right click brings up the inventory screen where you can select an item to be used or combined with other objects. Pressing your F1 keyboard key accesses the Options screen where adjustments can be made to music and speech volume, subtitles on or off as well as game saving and loading.

Upon starting the game, the great original musical score greets you. The music creates the lighthearted atmosphere for the game and, although it can become a bit repetitive, it is pleasant to listen to throughout. The graphics are bright, cheery, and clean. Characters' faces change with expressions and the cartoon-style lip-sync is handled very well. There is no "pixel hunting" in this game and the cursor turns red when an object can be examined more closely for use or pick up. The object is also given a written description and Gilbert tells you more about it when you look at it in inventory.

For the most part, the puzzles are object and conversation based. "Find this object for this person in order to get another object" kind of thing. And they are layered very deeply within the game so your final objective will take awhile to get to. There is one 3x3 slider puzzle late in the game which is pretty easy to solve even if you aren't very good at that type of puzzle. So, in my estimation, I would consider the puzzles of medium difficulty.

The Bad
I have very little criticism for this game. The designers went a little overboard with the conversations, I thought. You are sometimes given a long list of topics to talk about with any given character. Since you don't know which one will trigger the proper response to get you farther, you must click on them all. You can ESCape out to make them go faster, but doing that might make you miss an important puzzle clue.

The Bottom Line
I thoroughly enjoyed Gilbert Goodmate and would recommend it to everyone, especially those of you who enjoyed the Monkey Island Series and/or the Sierra Space Quest series. I laughed out loud on numerous occasions while playing it and found it to be a welcome and refreshing change of pace.

The Good
Its hard not to like this game. Its very close in feel to Monkey Island, (particularly the third one), with the same kind of humour and characterisation. The story-line is pretty basic and unremarkable, though the characters you meet along the way keep things interesting (I liked the bearded viking woman) and the dialogue, though a bit wordy in places, is pretty witty.

The Bad
The dialogue is a bit 'wordy' (ie its got words, but there are too many of them). Having said that its easy enough to skip it if you want to.

The Bottom Line
Fun; nice; best mushroom-adventure you'll ever play.