In one scene late in the game, Abbie and the Watcher have an extensive conversation about filling out criminal incident forms, in which both accurate answers and complete lies elicit amusing exchanges. Whilst I was pretty sure how to resolve this puzzle early on, I was happy to run through the various options for quite some time, just to get all the many variants of this particular conversation. Unfortunately, there are also occasions where you will be stuck hearing the same dialogue over and over again. Once Abbie is loose in Jackie’s house, practically every attempt to use an item you think might be useful results in the same response. In many situations, characters also have idle dialogue, which generally consists of a handful of lines repeated at regular intervals. If you attempt an interaction as one of these monologues starts, both the spoken words and the speech bubbles temporarily overlap, creating a visual and acoustic mess.

As well as the extensive dialogue puzzle, there are numerous inventory puzzles and a quite inventive challenge towards the end of the game involving word translations and item combinations. This puzzle provides further amusement as random combinations of words produce decidedly odd results. The game has two difficulty levels, which affects how much needs to be done to solve the puzzles. There is also a hint level which can be adjusted separately in the options menu. Hints are given by way of self-reflecting character monologues, so they mostly fall naturally into the game without breaking the immersion, and are delayed at lower hint levels.

At the “Easy” setting, the game could serve as an introduction to adventures for younger gamers or those without any genre experience. There is nothing unsuitable for a pre-teen audience, though children much younger than ten may not appreciate the humour as much. On “Hard” the puzzles are undoubtedly more tricky, but they are probably still not hard enough to slow down an experienced adventurer. Usually only one or two additional steps are required, and both locations and inventory are quite limited. The sojourn into the magical forest consists of only a single screen, and even in Jackie’s house you can only access the main floor and one of the upstairs rooms. The most items I ever had at one time were three (not counting words stored in inventory in the translation puzzle). For both levels, your current goal is always displayed in the top left of the screen so you never have any doubt of what you are trying to achieve.

There are a few additional features that merit mention. Pizza Morgana includes a Facebook application that allows it to make automatic status updates of your game progress. “Got to Magical Forest” will probably be somewhat different from the normal updates people post. This option has to be manually activated by players from the main menu screen, so it won’t affect the game or your Facebook account for those with no desire or ability to use it. The game also has an Autosave on exit, useful for those who forget to save, and presents a comic panel recap of the story so far on continuing or loading a saved game.

Unfortunately, I did come across a couple of bugs in the game that reflect a lack of polish. At one point, Abbie spoke in a room upstairs when the character was actually downstairs, causing her speech to appear from thin air. Later, in the translation puzzle (on Hard), conversation bubbles sometimes appeared with no actual speech when Jackie was suggesting what words to combine. There are also one or two translation errors (the game is Israeli in origin) but with the sheer volume of dialogue this is hardly unexpected.

Overall, I found Monsters & Manipulations in the Magical Forest a very enjoyable experience, and I look forward to further Pizza Morgana episodes. The central premise of a mystic pizza delivery company sets the scene for an alternative take on fantasy, and the cast do an excellent job of bringing this world to life. There are definite rough corners that could do with smoothing out, but nothing that should require great effort to resolve. Hardcore adventurers won’t find much challenge here, but if you are looking for a light humorous game, that’s exactly what you’ll get. Being an episodic game, it is relatively short, as I completed it in a couple of hours, but the single game price reflects its brief duration. Also available as part of a five-episode season directly from the developer’s website, the full cost will compare favourably with other commercial games, assuming they’re able to see the adventure through to completion. That’s always a challenge for episodic series, but if Corbomite Games manage to iron out the kinks and keep up the quality, I eagerly anticipate my next opportunity to see more of Terramagia and its denizens.