Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell

The Good
Freddi Fish's previous game, while already pretty solid, still had a few rough spots. But this game marks the point where Humongous Entertainment fully got the hang of how to handle this particular subseries of the Junior Adventures.

One of its predecessor's biggest flaws was its inability to stick out due to the lack of a clearly defined setting. This is no longer the case here, as this game's tropical resort setting gives it a much clearer identity of its own.

The high quality of the background artwork certainly helps. With its vibrant colors and large amount of variety, it's a far cry from what the Freddi Fish games started with. The character designs are pretty imaginative as well.

While I'm at it, I should mention that this game's cast is almost entirely original. With the obvious exception of Freddi and Luther, there is only one familiar face among them, and that character's role is pretty minor. What's more, the script is surprisingly amusing and colorful for a game aimed at the lower end of Humongous Entertainment's target demographic. It's no Pajama Sam or Spy Fox, but I had more fun than I expected listening to the character interactions.

The music is pretty good, too. Tom McGurk didn't depart too far from his previous style heard in the game's prequel, but the tropical undertones are apparent and further help bring the setting to life. The darker tone of the end game tracks in particular is worthy of praise and makes that part of the game more memorable.

The meat of the game still lies in the puzzles however, and those are pretty good as well. The game has a total of eight different puzzle chains with varying difficulty levels at its disposal, of which it will always select three: An easy one, a medium one and a hard one. The three easy puzzle chains don't have a whole lot of unique content, but even those help give certain locations more of a purpose. And the others are fairly well-designed for the most part and do a good job incorporating much of the game's world into the puzzle-solving.

Various other aspects of the game are also randomized. Most notably the identity of the culprit. Whereas its prequels always had the same culprits and revealed their identities to the players early on, the culprit here is randomly picked from six of the game's NPCs, with you having to figure out their identity yourself at the end. All of them have drastically different motives and meet different fates. It's an interesting idea to help keep subsequent playthroughs fresh, and it helps give the characters some complexity by showing their dark sides.

The Bad
If there's one aspect the game doesn't get right, it's the minigames. Most of them are less games and more simplistic toys. I wouldn't exactly call them good, but they get the job done and are completely optional. There's also a math-based minigame in one of the easy puzzle chains that's fine for what it is. But the one minigame that really drops the ball is Floating Fun. It's basically the world's most primitive matching game. Unless you're really bad at timing, this game is just insultingly easy. You actually have to play it for a bit for one of the two hard puzzle chains, and it's easily the low point of the game's entire puzzle-solving process. Don't repeat my mistake and keep on playing beyond that, just to see if the point of the game ever becomes apparent. There really is just as little to it as there appears to be at first glance.

Aside from that, my only real complaint about the game is that the fate one of the potential culprits meets at the end kind of rubs me the wrong way, as it plays into the cliché of humiliating a male character by having him act feminine. I don't think this has a good influence on children. Boys shouldn't grow up being conditioned to see femininity as embarrassing. The writer was clearly trying hard to promote positive messages with many of the culprit confrontation scenes, and the fates of the other culprits are actually pretty fitting, so it's unfortunate to see him slip up there.

The Bottom Line
Regardless, both of these complaints are ultimately just drops in the bucket. This is still a pretty strong effort from Humongous Entertainment as a whole. Easily the best of the Freddi Fish games so far, and also one of the better Junior Adventures overall. Aside from the lovely background artwork, I don't think any of its aspects are quite up there with the company's very best, but they're not too far behind either.

The Good
The graphics are basically cartoons, these graphics are very appealing, the voice acting is simply flawless and excellent, the mystery is fun to solve, of course because of the age the game is directed at the mystery isn't challenging enough, but it still proves that good old fun is there in solving mysteries in video games, unlike most mystery games nowadays that prove to contain loads of unsuitable content, the story is very well told through the cutscenes and throughout the game there will be several things to remind you of your goal and of the whole story, also so you don't get bored there are different types of this game in the CD, so every time you start there is a possibility that items will be in different areas, and the game is also very funny with Luther's incredible sense of humor and lots of wacky scenes.

The Bad
The game is sadly very short, this can get annoying, if you are playing the game to experience a long time of fun solving this will get in your way, the game for an experienced gamer cannot be more than 1 Hour 15 Minutes. The mystery is sadly not challenging, probably because it was aimed to a younger audience.

The Bottom Line
A cool and neat little game that anybody will enjoy if they just be very careful not to mind that it has been directed to a younger audience, this is evident in the game. Humongous Entertainment, I give Freddi Fish 3 a 5/5 rating