Two scant months since Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, um, launched the new Tales of Monkey Island, the third of five prospective installments in Telltale Games' most impressive episodic series to date has arrived, and it's easily on par with its forebears in terms of fun and faithfulness. Lair of the Leviathan is a more cohesive experience than the slightly disappointing Siege of Spinner Cay; a little longer, a lot less frustrating and much funnier besides, it features some superlatively imaginative environments to explore and some of the franchise's best puzzles to date. If Lair of the Leviathan is any indication - and with this first season of Tales now halfway told, it's fair to say it is - Telltale seems to have been made to make Monkey Island games.

Avert your eyes, now, if you haven't yet played through the first two chapters, for unlike Telltale's efforts with Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit et al, each episode of Tales of Monkey Island follows on directly from the last. After narrowly avoiding certain death at The Siege of Spinner Cay, our hero Guybrush Threepwood was swallowed - not to mention his ship the Screaming Narwhal and all - by a giant manatee. As the third chapter opens, Guybrush and his motley crew awaken relatively unscathed in the proverbial belly of the beast, where it transpires they are not alone. The Voodoo Lady's stalwart admirer Coronado DeCava and his sometime shipmates are themselves trapped inside the leviathan, although the ghoulish imprisonment seems to have rather robbed them of their senses: DeCava's crew have formed the Democratically United Brotherhood of the Manatee Interior, whose mantra, "united we stand, together we party", speaks to how they've passed the years since their ingestion; while the dangerously defensive DeCava, bent on reuniting with the love of his life, has concocted an escape plan as elaborate as it is unfeasible, to which the sudden arrival of the Screaming Narwhal poses a threat. So as not to "rock the manatee", as it were, Guybrush and his would-be assassin Morgan LeFlay must put aside their differences and play house for long enough to engineer their own significantly more urgent escape, each for their own purposes. As the Voodoo Lady explains in a brief tarot recap, Guybrush is on a quest to find La Esponja Grande and thereby rid the Caribbean of the voodoo pox he did accidentally unleash at the start of the first chapter, in an effort to make his nemesis LeChuck mortal. Morgan, meanwhile, fallen to debt, means to collect the considerable bounty the mad Marquis has placed on our piratical protagonist's head.

To date, the storytelling throughout the assorted Tales of Monkey Island has been so natural as to seem almost accidental, but given the tome of intriguing narrative that has accrued thus far, one can hardly ascribe the easy grace with which it's been told to mere chance. It will be a sacrilege in some circles to suggest as much, yet suggest it I must: in explicating on the continuing misadventures of Guybrush Threepwood, dear to all our hearts, Telltale Games' witty, self-aware writing staff have come so far into their own that they stand a chance of outdoing even the franchise's esteemed original creators - Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim freaking Schafer, deification notwithstanding. The laughs are plentiful, the dopey double-entendres and in-jokes present and correct. There's a delightful reference to Double Fine, a token heads-up to SCUMM, some pretty filthy puns and implications; with that and such an interesting, if necessarily imitative story to drive players from puzzle to puzzle, it's all you could ask, truly.

The design team, too, continue to excel. Their interpretations of classic characters - keep your eyes peeled for a returning favourite - are fond and faithful but not to a fault, while the handful of environments you'll explore throughout Lair of the Leviathan are original enough that they needn't play on the nostalgia we PC gamers of yore would surely feel. There aren't too many areas to hunt for puzzles in this time out, but what the third chapter of Tales of Monkey Island perhaps lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality, not to mention focus. The manatee mating grounds at the bottom of the deep blue sea is a particular highlight - can Guybrush still hold his breath for ten minutes, do you think?

The puzzles are equal parts logic and off-the-wall whimsy, tight without being any less tricky than needs must, restrained enough that you'll not likely find yourself combining random inventory items to use on every hotspot in sight. There's a game show of sorts, an incomplete ear canal to reassemble, a literal face-off between Guybrush and another pirate and even a leviathan love-in, no less than a direct callback to Secret of Monkey Island's insult sword-fighting that improves in many ways the frustrating faults of those original encounters.

As per usual, the voice acting is superb, the sound design sparse but absolutely suitable, and while graphically, Lair of the Leviathan is hardly pushing pixels, that's never been one of Telltale Games' top priorities. Their target audience - with this series in particular - is spread across the board diversely enough that, like World of Warcraft, a smooth running experience even on low spec computers is simply more important to more players than multi-threaded, bump-mapped voxel charts are to a some-might-say spoiled few. Let's be honest: no-one's screaming for Guybrush Threepwood to be rendered into the uncanny valley and the oblivion beyond its shores. For doing our favourite mighty pirate's inherently-cartoonish character justice without pulling the rug entirely from under him, Telltale's character artists should be commended, and indeed, for their contributions, the rest of the development team.

It's a joy to see the Monkey Island franchise so thoroughly rejuvenated in this era of bigger, better and more bad-ass, and with great puzzles, good looks and such insight into the unique sense of humour that helped make this series so beloved in the first instance, Lair of the Leviathan is the perfect showcase piece for a studio hitting their stride at exactly the right time, and a fine, fun game besides.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).