CLEO: A Pirate’s Tale is a lighthearted pirate adventure that draws inspiration from Monkey Island and Zelda as a cynical young girl who yearns for adventure ends up getting exactly that!
In CLEO: A Pirate’s Tale you follow the adventure of Cleo, a young girl who is fascinated with the legendary adventures of the pirate captain Cabeca, but is stuck in a boring fishing village surrounded by fishermen and unsuccessful pirates. She’s fed up with her boring life and wishes for something more exciting. Then one day she finds a mysterious pirate logbook and witnesses a ghost who scrawls a strange message on the wall. It looks like she may get her adventure afterall!
The gameplay in CLEO: A Pirate’s Tale really does feel like a mashup of Zelda and Monkey Island. There are point and click adventure style puzzles, but the control scheme is much more like Zelda and there’s a little combat and little minigames. It’s an interesting mix of game styles that adds a lot of variety of the game and allows for lots of fun little surprises.
The CLEO: A Pirate’s Tale demo build takes around 30 minutes to play through and tells the first part of Cleo’s adventure. It’s a fun game with some excellent pixel art animation, great writing and likeable characters. It’s got a great sense of humor and there are fun little in-jokes and nods to classic games – such as one puzzle that requires you to use something that looks very much like The Secret of Monkey Island’s Dial-A-Pirate code wheel. It’s a very promising game that looks set to offer a fresh and inventive take on the traditional Lucasarts-style adventure. A pirates adventure well worth picking up.
Download CLEO: A Pirate’s Tale Kickstarter Demo Here (Windows & Mac)