Corto Maltese and the Secret of Venice

Corto Maltese and the Secret of Venice is a side-view point-and-click adventure built around the comic-book universe created by Italian artist Hugo Pratt, whose seafaring antihero has sold well over five million copies in print. The central hook is a poison-and-emerald MacGuffin: you wake up drugged, get handed a compass and a gazette full of cryptic codes, and have roughly three hours to crack riddles across Venetian backdrops before the game ends. That runtime is not a typo. The Compass and Gazette system is the game's most interesting idea. You receive symbol codes in the Gazette, punch them into the Compass, and unlock puzzle sequences gated behind two difficulty tiers labeled Profane (easier, self-contained) and Insider (harder, requiring you to research answers using Google Maps, Wikipedia, or other real-world sources). The Insider path is a genuinely unusual design choice - some players find the external research gives a detective-investigation feeling, while others reasonably ask why a game is sending them to a browser to progress. The puzzles themselves are uneven: a few are clever lateral-thinking problems, but many feel disconnected from the story around them, and the sparse scene design makes the hidden-object-style tilt-to-reveal mechanic feel underpopulated rather than exploratory. Where the game does earn its keep is in presentation. Original Hugo Pratt comic panels appear as animated cutscenes between play segments, and they are genuinely well-drawn and witty. The environmental photography and watercolor artwork hold up too, and the orchestral score sets an appropriately smoky, conspiratorial mood. The problem is that these strengths are a frame around a picture that never quite materialises. The present-day sequences use a visual style inconsistent with the source comics, the English translation is rough in places, and the story imports familiar characters from the Corto Maltese canon - Rasputin, Jack London - without giving non-fans enough context to care. If you already know the comics well, the fan-service visions and references will land. If you don't, the narrative will feel loosely assembled. Steam reception has been mostly negative, and the criticisms are consistent: too short, puzzles disconnected from narrative, translation issues, and some players reporting launch or loading problems. The achievements appear bugged for many users. For a committed Hugo Pratt fan this might function as an interactive curiosity alongside the source books, but as a standalone adventure game it delivers less mechanical depth and story satisfaction than most genre contemporaries from the same era.

Alex · Scout Team

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