Publisher: Gray Design
Developer: Gray Design
Year: 1992
Platform: DOS

Rating: 1

I wish I could say that the final game in the Hugo shareware trilogy finally put things together. But despite a significant improvement in graphics and playability, this incredibly short game still manages to be dull and offensive.

Hugo and Penelope are flying home from vacation, because apparently Hugo owns a two-seat airplane capable of flying across the Atlantic. Except its navigation breaks and Hugo crashes it in the middle of the Amazon. Miraculously unscathed, Penelope immediately rides her lucky streak and decides to explore the jungle on her own; naturally, she gets bit by the world’s largest spider. A native explains to Hugo that he must find the antidote within 24 hours to save her and is given explicit instructions on where to find it.

One immediately notices the improved graphics, as Hugo III looks much more like the late EGA Sierra games than the early ones. The animations are still rare and awkward, but at least everything is clear and colorful. The parser is fairly responsive, and at times will give you subtle hints if you’re on the right track. And while a couple of puzzles might make you raise your eyebrows, they’re not so far out in left field to be pure guesswork.

But this game is just not interesting. Most of the items in the game are randomly scattered throughout the environment with no logical reason for their presence. Nobody has anything colorful to say. The sound effects are again almost non-existent and do nothing to add to the mood. And I just can’t care about the end goal. In all three games, one part of this cursed couple spends the whole game rescuing the other, and honestly I felt more emotional investment in rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser. A tandem game where you must use both Hugo and Penelope to help the other could have been a fun new direction. But here we just get more of the same.

And…let’s not forget to mention the racism! The village Hugo stumbles across surprisingly has generally approximate depictions of what the housing might look like, and the natives’ use of blowguns is very plausible. But the non-English speaking people just say nonsense words that are clearly not part of any native language. Worse, the townsfolk refer to one of their own as a witch doctor, a British term. And this witch doctor likes to eat people. Cannibalism used to be prominent among the Wari’ people of the Amazon (but no longer thanks to Christian missionaries), though it was done as a way to honor their dead. Here it’s portrayed as a vicious misfortune for outsiders. Just gross.

And with all that it took me a mere 45 minutes to cruise through this, a relative blessing. I have no idea how much money Mr. Gray made from this embarrassment of games, but it was clearly too much.