The Adventures of Willy Beamish

Overview

A point-and-click graphic adventure game with some good graphics and animation for 1991 standards, but adheres to the Sierra game design too closely with an unlikable character. Better stick to LucasArts' games instead. I personally found the plot stupid.

Review

I first read about The Adventures of Willy Beamish in High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games as one of the games that Dynamix had put out at one time. At the time it was on the Macintosh Garden and I was intrigued by it, but not even HardcoreGaming101 (which I foolishly trusted at one time) praised it, though they do have a more comprehensive overview that really covers all the bases (though I have to disagree with thinking Willy's deaths weren't funny because he's 12. I don't think it's a bad thing in the least, though (other than having to reset from a saved point) as 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). Most of the time Willy FAFO'd and it's hard to have sympathy for someone like that unless it was caused by someone worse than him (like his younger sister).

It was developed by Dynamix and didn't have the major influence of Roberta Williams, but it follows their design philosophy anyway...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.

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. Not only was The Simpsons (in the early days) actually funny and infinitely quotable, Willy Beamish feels off-putting. Even with a walkthrough when I played it (which avoided unwinnable situations), I can't tell you how many times I died at the hands of the thugs. Ultimately wasn't able to feel that I could recommend it to anybody.

Player Notes

Two versions of this review were written, the first in March 2015 (I first played it in the 2010-2012 timeframe, I believe on a Mac) when I initially wrote the review and a second update in 2023 when I gave it a rating (it got a "MEH", equivalent to a 2/5).

Port & Rerelease Notes

The Adventures of Willy Beamish was released on DOS and Amiga first. Later, a "talkie" CD version was released for DOS (I'm not sure about the Mac version, which was released in 1992...the first one I played I Mac didn't). In 1993 a Sega CD version was released, that did have voices. This is an issue as these sorts of games didn't have the option to have text AND voices. I seem to remember that from playing, anyway. I may have finished it on a PC running some flavor of ScummVM. I wanted to add a cover for the DOS version in the new version of this page, but MobyGames' cover is a bit washed out color-wise.

Screenshots

Paring carrots to avoid being sent to military school! (Screenshot Credit: Planete-Adventure)