Like the the lush environments, the characters are fluidly animated: they move smoothly, run quickly but gracefully, and a cel-shading technique gives them a very bright, vivid look. Even more important, they are brought to life by a cast of very talented voice actors. When I found out that the same actress, Jules de Jong, did the voice for the hawkish Morgane and the petulant Sancha I was utterly impressed, but particular praise is owed to Laurance Bouvard, who provides the voice for Sunny and gives a thoroughly believable and charming performance, and William Vanderpuye, who wonderfully voiced the short and prickly voodoo priest Chemi’n. The sound effects, most noticeably the ones involving water, are masterfully implemented and add great value to the player’s feeling of immersion. The musical score nicely blends together tribal rhythms and pop melodies and – whilst slightly repetitive – displays some good theme variations in the tenser scenes.

In terms of interface, So Blonde is a standard point-and-click adventure with a smart cursor that displays – with a right-click of the mouse on elibigle hotspots – all the possible actions: walk, look, take/operate and, when appropriate, talk. A tap of the space-bar will automatically reveal all the hotspots in the current location, and sometimes its help is really invaluable. Not because objects are difficult to see, but because each location is filled with items to examine, and many of them serve no other purpose than to enrich the environment, often with wisecracks or witty references to classics of the genre, blockbuster movies or TV shows and pop-culture. It should be noted that Sunny walks across screens with a deadly slow pace, but a double left-click will make her run or immediately change locations if clicking an exit. Still, it’s a pity that even when Sunny manages to find a map, it can’t be used to fast-travel, sometimes forcing the player on long walks through the whole island. This issue brings up another problem: upon entering or immediately after leaving a location, the game displays a loading screen and, even with the graphical parameters settled at the lowest, the loading time can be pretty long. Given that almost every task you have to face will require a lot of back and forth between various locations, the loading screens quickly become tiresome.

You’ll have plenty of reason to travel the island, too, as So Blonde presents a good number of challenges, especially inventory-based puzzles. Sunny’s inventory is capacious and will be filled by plenty of items right from the very beginning of the game. Thankfully, apart from a very few occasions, you’ll be able to take every object that isn’t nailed down (and sometimes even if it is) immediately, preventing a lot of annoying backtracking. Some puzzles are fairly logical and consequential, but others are a bit silly, particularly early on when Sunny has no clear direction of what to do next and some of her actions seem a little senseless. For example, I still wonder if there wasn’t another way to enter the town than the MacGyver-type solution Sunny choose, and later in the game, when Sunny has to get rid of a suspicious seagull, I was almost driven mad that our blonde could be nitpickingly choosy on how to clear her way. Luckily, these puzzles are the minority and the other challenges, even the few logic-based and mechanical puzzles, are more reasonable and better integrated in the story.

Another interesting feature is the ability to play not only in Sunny’s shoes, but also as Juan Grant, the Mayor of the city, and Max, a cute, brownish little creature that resembles a cross between a dog and a bear. Some obstacles can be overcome only by the cooperation of these characters, and it’s really nice how these passages are worked into the main plot. The gameplay is also interspersed with some mini-games that consist almost entirely of arcade actions that require hand-eye coordination. With few exceptions – arm wrestling against a pirate and the completely optional rifle range are the only ones that stand out – I found them useless at best and dreadful at worst, since they do nothing more than interrupt the natural flow of the game. Thankfully, if you share my natural revulsion of these kinds of segments, you shouldn’t be worried since each and every one of them can be automatically won, even without a single try.

My other complaint about the gameplay concerns the linearity, which sometimes feels extremely forced. All story-based games face this challenge, of course, but here it’s possible that you’ll have perfectly figured out what to do and already have all the necessary items, but if you missed a single line of dialogue, the event you are waiting for simply won’t trigger. Luckily, such ocurrences are seldom but it is nonetheless a nuisance, since the game is already difficult. So Blonde clearly isn’t a game for novices; on the contrary, it’s a tough challenge that will put to the test even the most experienced adventurers, thanks to some brain-teasing puzzles and the vastness of the game world.

The difficulty contributes to the game being pretty long, taking roughly fifteen to twenty hours to complete. Luckily, So Blonde has an ideal pace and never becomes boring or feels artificially lengthened. Rather, it still feels too short: there is so much meat on the bone and the characters are so likeable, the environments so rich and the story so involving that I didn’t really want it to end. Now I can’t wait for the upcoming “alternate reality” version, announced for Nintendo DS and Wii. This game does have some unpolished aspects, including an installation procedure that is one of the worst I’ve ever seen (I had to uninstall my antivirus and slow down my disk drive to finally get the game working), but it is nonetheless one of the most compelling adventures I have played in a long time and a journey that every adventurer worth the title should embark upon. Just be sure to bring a good pair of sunglasses and some suntan lotion when you pack.