Editor's note: This preview first appeared on Adventure Gamers back in July 2000, but with its upcoming release in North America through Got Game Entertainment we decided to republish this preview. Release date of Tony Tough is t.b.a.

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths is a traditional 2D point-and-click adventure by an Italian game company Protonic Interactive. I was given a chance to play an expanded demo of the game which is currently without a publisher outside Italy.

Tony Tough is an adventure which draws its inspiration strongly from classic LucasArts titles, most notably Day of the Tentacle and The Curse of Monkey Island. Tony is a private dick, working in a big investigative agency and clothed into an appropriate trench coat. His assistant Pantagruel — a violet tapir of some sort — disappears and Tony is forced to go search for him on Halloween - the same evening he was hoping to solve the case of a candy-stealer he has worked on for a decade.

Had it not been for the Italian speech still in place in the demo and the occasional clumsy translation in the subtitles, I could've swore I was playing some unreleased LucasArts title from a couple of years back - Tony Tough is that much reminiscent of some of LucasArts' older adventures. The meter-long protagonist wears oversized glasses and looks a little like Wally from the Monkey Island series. The overall graphics style is pretty wacky and supports the game's cartoon atmosphere.

Gameplay is pretty standard adventure fare with inventory-based puzzles and multiple-choice dialogue. Both visual and verbal jokes were amusing - one of the highlights was the Santa Claus poster in Tony's office which boldly stated "I want to believe!". The demo had some minor technical nitpicks such as slow mouse response time that will hopefully be fixed for a release version.

Even though not up to par with the modern adventure games technology-wise, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths was a pleasant experience and its relaxed gameplay brought back memories from the golden days of adventure gaming. Here's hoping that Protonic will find a publisher for Tony so that adventure gamers around the world will get a chance to enjoy his witty comments.