Flight of the Amazon Queen

The year 1992 changed adventure games forever. Monkey Island 2 had just landed, LucasArts sat down on the throne, and suddenly every other studio knew how to do it too. Except knowing and being able are two different things.

Flight of the Amazon Queen came out in 1995, and the Australian studio Interactive Binary Illusions didn't even try to hide where it was looking for inspiration. You play as Joe King, an independent pilot trying to make a living running charter flights in the jungle, who soon finds himself caught up in a story that combines B-movie adventure, dinosaurs, and a couple of villains with megalomaniacal plans. The setting is deliberately pulpy, the tone is light, and humor is present in every other line.

The controls are classic point-and-click with a verb bar at the bottom of the screen — exactly what you know from SCUMM games. Pixel hunting isn't much of a problem here, thankfully, and the puzzle logic stays on an acceptable level. The dialogues are written with heart, Joe works as a character, and the game has that right kind of lightness that wasn't a given in adventure games from the nineties. You'll run into passages, though, where solutions rely more on combinatorial luck than logic — a period curse that the creators never fully got a handle on.

What gave the game its fame was also its business model: in 1995 it came out as one of the first commercially released freeware games, available for free on magazine cover discs at the time. Back then, that was a move worth noticing. Today, what I remember most is the atmosphere — a bit Raiders of the Lost Ark, a bit cheap comic book, and yet it all worked together. The graphics hold up solidly, the music is competent, but the overall production never quite reaches the craftsmanship of LucasArts in their golden era. It's missing that extra pizzazz, that layer that turns a good game into an unforgettable one.

Today the game will suit anyone who loves nineties adventure games and isn't expecting a second Monkey Island — because that's what this never was and never claimed to be. It's an honest, pleasant game with working humor and an adventurous heart. You can fire it up in your browser via DOSBox-based emulators these days, it'll take up an afternoon, and it won't leave a bitter taste. You can't say that about all games from that era.