You sons of bitches better get excited. Because the most anticipated Goshzilla review of all time (my arbitrary estimation) has finally arrived!

I don’t write very often. In fact, my current article submission rate is somewhere in the range of once/twice a year. And if you sat down and did the math, you’d find that about 90% of my work in the last 3 years has been Hugo’s House of Horrors-related. Why is this? It’s because Goshtober demands quality, and inevitably my adventure game juices start mixing in with my Halloween juices and they form a 16-color Arnold Palmer known as Hugo’s House of Horrors. Hugo, for me, has become just as synonymous with the Halloween season as orange Oreos and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. If I could I’d have Hugo decorations in my lawn all autumn. Like maybe a foam tombstone that reads “Just your regular old grave type” or a cutout of the perverted old quizmaster that shrieks “WHAT WAS THE NAME OF ROY ROGER’S DOG?!” whenever unsuspecting children walk by. These are my aspirations in life. As part of these aspirations, I am proud to present you with the final installation of the Hugo Trilogy, “Hugo’s Jungle of Doom”!

When we last left Hugo and Penelope, they were visiting Hugo’s uncle Horace in Europe. This game starts off with an intro sequence wherein Hugo and Penelope are flying back home. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean they encounter a storm which causes their compass to stop functioning properly(?). Somewhere in this intro sequence, it occured to me that Hugo himself is flying his own plane back to America. Well, this is already the most interesting version of Hugo we’ve seen so far. I mean, it’s no surprise that he’s got his own plane after we’ve seen the kind of money he comes from. But I love that we can now add “incompetent pilot” to Hugo’s resume alongside “cliche-survivor” and “girlfriend-haver”. Anyway, he gets lost and has to make an emergency landing in the jungles of South America. Penelope, in a move proving herself to be Hugo’s soulmate, doesn’t spend 2 minutes in the jungle before finding a giant spiderweb, standing with her back to it, and being bitten by a “dreaded tree-spider”. A native woman informs Hugo that Penelope has been poisoned and that the only known cure is water from a nearby pond called the “pool of life”. So there’s our plot.

This chapter of the series has made a lot of improvements over the last. The backgrounds are not only well-drawn, but they are consistently so. In previous installments, the quality of the art varied greatly, and often seemed disconnected from one screen to the next, but the artwork in this game actually looks somewhat comparable to big-budget adventure titles of the same era. This game is also probably the easiest of the series. In the case of the Hugo Trilogy (and many other adventure games), making the game easier was definitely a smart choice. Moreso than ever, there are feasible, logical connections between the problems and the solutions.