Divinity: Original Sin developers Larian Studios' five-in-one math game Monkey Tales is an addictive little timewaster that will no doubt have your tykes doing subtractions and multiplications merrily as they battle mummies, banshees and free captive (yet still somehow fairly belligerent) monkeys around the world.
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It's strange, having to do a review for a game intended for people who perceive the world so differently from me. As I was guiding my avatar through a desert in search of a kidnapped princess in the first game of the Monkey Tales collection titled The Princess of Sundara, I kept notes of game mechanics that I found lacking or thematically contradictory. But I soon realized, why am I taking note of this? Will kids care? Will parents who would like a fun game to make their children practice their math skills on top of providing them with a pleasant distraction be very worried about the game's in-universe consistency? Have you guessed the answer before finishing the previous sentence?
Now, I'm aware that there are, say, kids movies like Food Fight and Up. One is bad, the other is not so bad. Sure, plenty of kids won't care and will just sit down and watch either of the two while chewing on something they shouldn't be chewing on, but games are a different medium. A kid can't just passively sit there and be entranced by bright primary colors, celebrity-voiced animals and the occasional fart joke every few minutes. A game has to be instantly gripping, easy and quick to master, and - in the case of an educational game - stealthy and non-pushy about its edificatory content.
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Monkey Tales presents a world divided into "rooms" (not necessarily actual rooms) where the puzzle is two-fold: to escape the room, you must access a mini-game device, where you battle a monkey in a math game. There's also the bonus objective of trying to find all bananas in the room, which you can get by opening doors, diverting lasers and pushing crates around. A full overview of the map is always easily found by holding down CTRL. The key bindings are set, by the way, so I hope you like using the arrow keys for movement instead of WASD!
Here's my little in-universe niggle: if you have to save the monkeys on the way to saving the princess, why are they all so uncooperative and make you do math games before they come to your personal zoo? The personal zoo window, while a cute little addition to the game, doesn't really add anything but indeed a single view of a monkey enclosure that gets monkeys added to it as you free them from the rooms you pass through. The more bananas you find, the more the monkey happiness meter in the top right corner fills. But to what end? I have no idea!
Mechanics niggle: the standard music volume (adjustable in options with no fuss) drowns out the dialogue a bit. Not that you really need dialogue because everything is captioned, but that's why it's only a niggle. Also, in the early goings of the game, you are told you can "rescue the monkey" after you won the mini-game by walking out of the door, aka exiting the room. It does not tell you that you will not be able to go back and get all the bananas! So make sure you get all the bananas before you leave the room!
But the actual puzzle aspect of the game is good fun - I wiled away quite a few hours on something for grade schoolers, so you know Larian got that down pat. Also amusing: the adult jokes and references sprinkled fairly subtly throughout. An NPC is called Emily, but the fantasy world spelling of that is E'Molly. Co-written by Tyga and Whiz Khalifa, this one?
You can download each of the five games separately from the Larian website, or just buy the pack on Steam. You'd be well advised to do the latter, actually, since the Steam fivepack costs as much as a single game from the Larian site for some reason. It's quite a good deal, because I can imagine plenty of parents secretly wasting some time on this one as well!
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Monkey Tales was reviewed from a Steam code provided by the publisher.