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I first wrote about The Adventures of Willy Beamish (the screenshot in the Info Box is from Wikipedia) back in 2015. On the onset it looked alright. Some slick animation (for DOS standards at least) and some charmingly dated sequences that only the 1990s can do made it at least look interesting. Unfortunately, it still holds true to the Sierra On-Line tradition of unforeseeable deaths and the fact that doing one wrong thing in the beginning (or NOT doing the right thing in the beginning) can completely screw you over for the rest of the game, which this game does in abundance. Despite being developed by Sierra subsidiary Dynamix, it does a lot of things similar to its parent company.

I noted that in the original review that "there's really not a lot of things I can really say about this game that isn't repeated in the HardcoreGaming101 review" with the exception of some of the death sequences. But I'd have to disagree—Willy is a little monster in half the game and not in the comedic sociopath way like Guybrush Threepwood is. (This is of course one of the weaknesses of the game).

Part of the problem is I can't tell if it's for kids or adults...on one hand it's a game for children but there's also the box tagline ("What if you were nine years old again...knowing what you know now?") and what would be crude (and often dry) humor by 1991 standards. HG101 compares it to The Simpsons, but while The Simpsons is infinitely quotable and you can grow to like it, Willy Beamish is kind of off-putting.

I wrote that even with a walkthrough (I played the game sometime in the 2010-2012 timeframe), I died at the hands of the thugs multiple times, and ultimately wasn't able to feel that I could recommend it to anybody.

FINAL RATING:   

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