After the soul crushing Gyroscope we arrive at the final ever Wally Week game from the Icarus software publishing house Mikro-Gen. Slowly plodding in at Number #76 from the Your Sinclair Top 100 is Three Weeks in Paradise.
Mikro-Gen delivered solid titles that soldwell and they were having a run of high rated games, even seeing one of their arcade adventure games – Pyjamarama – beating Elite to the title of Game of the Month in the November issue of Personal Computer Games back in 1984. However, when they attempted to create a game that relied on expansion packs being bought with their latest game – Shadow of the Unicorn – things really didn’t go overly great for the software house and eventually they ended up selling and dropping into receivership.
However, returning to Three Weeks in Paradise this being the final Wally Week game, it was made that bit bigger and ever so slightly more bizarre in the puzzle department. The main story is that Wally, Wilma and Herbert (Wally’s wife and son) have all become trapped upon a tropical island, not only this Wilma and Herbert have managed to get themselves placed upon the dinner-time menu of the island’s locals. It’s down to Wally to solve the many “humourous” puzzle’s, rescue his family, then build a raft to get off the island.
If we attempt to ignore the 1980’s cartoon casual racism on the box art and concentrate on the game itself, Three Weeks in Paradise hasn’t survived overly well through the years into the 21st Century. No longer can we accept the incredibly slow pace in which Wally plods along, nor in truth should we have accepted it back in 1986. Along with this we’ve got puzzles and objects that barely – if at all – make little sense and you really need to have in your hand a printed solution to solve this game, which really wouldn’t make it fun. There is a nice feature of removing the game’s colour to stop the colour clash but it isn’t really the saving grace it needs.
It seems thirty years in passing hasn’t done Three Weeks in Paradise any really favours, and it shan’t be making my ultimate Top Ten.
Originally published June 13, 2016. Updated October 25, 2022.
