The game is technically a Spin-Off and prequel to So Blonde, as the protagonist of that game met Morgane during her adventures. However, no knowledge of the earlier game is needed, and people who don't know that it's a spin-off may not even notice.
The game was released in 2012 for PC (available on Steam), Playstation 3, Wii, and Nintendo DS.
This game provides examples of:
- Accidental Murder: Anita's husband accidentally killed a drunken guard captain who was accosting Anita. He caused the captain to hit his head, which in turn caused the captain to stagger off the edge of the dock and drown. There was, however, a witness to testify that it was accidental if only he could be found.
- A Minor Kidroduction: The first part of the game features Morgane as a child. The chores her mother gets her to do serve to introduce the basic game mechanics.
- Bedsheet Ghost: The "ghost" which Morgane arranges for Dinsdale and Mitchell to see looks like this, because a bedsheet is exactly what it is. (Real ghosts do exist in the game, but look more ghoulish.)
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Enemy pirate captain Simpkins is fairly easily identified as an eventual Big Bad, but he's also working with the shaman of Turtle Island, not met until later. They're of about equal villainous-ness.
- Big Eater: Carlo, one of the crew members recruited by Morgane, doesn't have many interests but meals. His price for joining is some chicken. (Razzo tries to tell him he should set his price higher, but he seems to consider the chicken quite sufficient.)
- The Big Guy: Diego, first mate of Alessandro's ship and therefore (reluctantly) one of Morgane's people, is huge, and very muscular. He generally defaults to grumpy rather than violent, and is more often used by Morgane for heavy lifting than thuggery, but when fighting is called for, he doesn't have to worry much about opposition. (Two guards clear out just at the threat of him.)
- Big Guy, Little Guy: The two Atabey chiefs, Bajari and Chemi'n.
- Blood Magic: Morgane needs some animal blood for the ritual to wake Chief Chemi'n. She's glad to learn that she doesn't actually have to kill a chicken herself - the already-dead one in the back of Tasco's shop will do.
- Brainless Beauty: Sonia. Morgane expresses a distaste for this type.Morgane: I don't know what it is, but I have a complete aversion to those with more beauty than brains. [...] I'm developing a real hatred for idiotic blondes.
- Bold Explorer: Buckleberry Tanner, whose clues and maps Morgane and Briscoe are following to find the Golden Turtle. He was governor of Hollow Island for a time, but his drive to explore was too great to stay put.
- Butt-Monkey: Arno, a minor antagonist, never comes out of anything well. When first met, as a bully during Morgane's childhood, he's knocked out with a wooden sword, tied up, and rolled down a hill. Then he's stampeded by a donkey and cart. When next seen, he loses his new sword in the sea and is roundly laughed at. After that, he fails at his task by getting chased down, beaten up, and tied to a post. Then, he notices that his captain is sailing away without him. His personality is such that he gets no sympathy.Arno: But why would Simpkins leave without me?
Morgane: See? No-one likes you. - Call-Forward: Chemi'n, before woken from his trance, says "The blonde will be our saviour." Irrelevant to this game, but a reference to Sunny, the protagonist of the game it was spun off from. Morgane's comment after talking to Brainless Beauty Sonia, when she says she's "developing a real hatred for idiotic blondes", is probably also a reference to her own future interaction with Sunny.
- The Captain: Alessandro Castillo is technically the captain of the Winsome Maid, but early on puts his daughter Morgane in charge as acting captain, both as a test and to give her experience. As such, neither really fulfils the trope - Alessandro is too hands-off, while Morgane is too new and isn't always taken seriously.
- Childhood Friends: Morgane has two, Nell and Bobby. They're first seen in the introductory first chapter, when they're all kids, but they both show up again later. Nell is still on her home island, and is waiting for news of Bobby (who she still has a crush on since those early days). Bobby has gone to sea, and turns out to have joined the crew of the villainous Simpkins. He regrets it, though, and wants out.
- Combat Stilettos: Morgane doesn't let the heels on her boots impede her mobility.
- Distinction Without a Difference: Sancha tries a particularly feeble one:Morgane: Did you lie to me?
Sancha: ...only if you consider not telling the truth to be a lie. - Dressed to Plunder: The pirate dress code is in effect. In particular:
- Peg Legs: Check. In fact, Morgane's childhood home has a rack of them, left from prominent pirate ancestors. Simpkins, one of the villains, has a prominent one.
- Nice hats: Check. Alessandro wears one, although Morgane never does. (She does have a skull-and-crossbones bandana as a kid, though.)
- Gold earrings: Check. Morgane has them. Also, Nacho wants Morgane to get him one, so he can really look the part of a pirate.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Pierre LaCroix is drowning his sorrows because a shipment of cloth he requires has gone missing. Naturally, he has information Morgane needs, so naturally, she has to solve his problem.
- Drowning Pit: Simpkins tries to get rid of Briscoe by leaving him tied to a stake as the tide comes in.
- Eccentric Millionaire: Thomas Briscoe considers himself to be this (with "eccentric" being softer than things like "mad" or "crazy", which is what other people who know he's looking for the Golden Turtle tend to use).
- Ego Island: Buckleberry Tanner named Tanner Island after himself, for which he was teased by his wife. Since he didn't seem to make much effort to tell people that it existed, he seems to have given up on any ego boost from it.
- Expose the Villain, Get His Job: Tanama ends up getting appointed new shaman of Turtle Island after the previous one is exposed as a traitor.
- Friend to All Living Things: Tanama sees this as an indicator of goodness. Because of this, Morgane is able to use Uncle Eduardo the parrot to convince Tanama that she's trustworthy.
- Ghostly Goals: The ghost of Mabel Thorne, former archivist on Crab Island, wants her murder avenged before she'll give Morgane any information.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Morgane still has a (much-abused) teddy bear given to her as a child, but she wouldn't want to be seen following this trope. If players try to pick it up, she absolutely refuses:Morgane: Brilliant idea. Wandering around a pirate ship holding your teddy is sure to win your crew's respect.
- Gender-Blender Name: Captain Hilary Simpkins. While Hilary used to be mostly a male name, many people would now assume it to be female - which Captain Simpkins isn't.
- Get Out!: When Elizabeth realises that Simpkins's thugs have made off with some jewellery, she boots her husband Thomas (who she blames for them getting involved in the whole thing) out of their house until he retrieves it.
- Gossipy Hens / Nosy Neighbor: Sancha is supposedly the focal point of gossip on Hollow Island.
- Grande Dame: Elizabeth, Thomas Briscoe's wife, is very posh and very concerned with propriety. She has no fear whatsoever of the thugs who break into her house, but is highly offended by their lack of manners (they declined tea and cucumber sandwiches).
- Grappling-Hook Pistol: Morgane improvises one.
- Henpecked Husband: Thomas Briscoe does seem to care for his wife, but the fact that he left without explaining where he was going is probably understandable once we meet her. (She's less worried about his safety than outraged that he embarrassed her with his absence at dinner with the Hamiltons.)
- Hollywood Voodoo: Morgane visits a village of the Atabey natives, but the Chief she needs to talk to is in a trance. She has to perform a ritual (involving a dead chicken, among other things) to bring him out of it. (Well, she thinks she has to. He'd rather she hadn't.)
- Human Ladder: As a kid, Morgane recruits Bobby and Nell to help her get to various places. Later in life, she has continued the habit of using associates as climbing equipment.
- Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Miss Brown, personal assistant to the Governor of Hollow Island, or so she views herself. She considers herself to be the reason the Governor is functional, having "organized his life for him."
- Indy Ploy: Morgane sometimes uses these, albeit at a comparatively sedate pace. Illustrated after she starts a fire:Morgane: That worked perfectly! [beat] I hope there was a good reason for doing this.
- Irish Priest: Father Jérôme, despite his name, seems to be of Irish extraction. (He may just have tweaked his name due to working in the French Quarter).
- It Will Never Catch On: "Some idiot" convinced Anita to get some matchbooks made with her bar's name on them. Anita thinks it was a terrible decision, and may be right about that, but in a different era, it was common enough that a trope arose from it.
- Lost at Sea: Uncle Eduardo is reported to have been lost at sea after a big storm. Morgane hears rumours that he actually made it to land, but her father thinks she's wasting her time (and the ship's) chasing empty gossip. Uncle Eduardo is not only alive but a) in possession of a vital clue; and b) a parrot, which nobody had mentioned before then.
- Medieval Stasis: The game is not so much set the golden age of piracy as in a place that somehow stayed stuck in that age, but you might not know it if not for the games which this one was spun off from, since it never actually matters. Still, there are a few clues around (such as a model plane found on Tanner Island, an I [heart] LA t-shirt in an archive/museum, and suchlike).
- Mini-Game: There are several:
- Sword-fighting, when young Morgane fights a duel against a bully using wooden swords.
- A slot machine from which something needs to be won.
- Shape matching, when Morgane has to match keys to locks in a short time.
- A chase where Morgane has to dodge around buildings and obstacles to catch someone.
- One where Morgane has to repair a rope bridge while crossing it, as birds attack both it and her.
- A simple Towers of Hanoi puzzle on a timer.
- Mole in Charge: It turns out that the people stealing eggs from Turtle Island are doing so with the full cooperation of an inside accomplice - Baba Carey, who runs the place as its shaman.
- Mysterious Stranger: A man in one of the bars is not only a mysterious stranger, but makes a point of acknowledging and emphasising that he's a mysterious stranger. He turns out to be the bar owner's long-lost husband, who is unrecognisable due to his burns and who thinks that his love would reject him if he identified himself.
- Neat Freak: Miss Brown, the secretary, has a breakdown when a single key is not in its proper place on the rack.
- Nightmare Face: The deliberately-mysterious stranger on Crab Island claims this part of the reason not to show his face.Morgane: Don't tell me. You've been known to scare children?
Stranger: I've been known to scare wolves. - Noodle Incident: Involving a young Morgane, a strong magnet, and a compass.Morgane: I'm sure they'll find that ship one day.
- Not Me This Time: Nathaniel tries to invoke this on behalf of Captain Simpkins, demanding to know why everyone automatically assumes Simpkins is up to no good. It doesn't fly.Nathaniel: [sigh] Who am I kidding? It's sure to be him.
- Old Maid: Sancha, who's still looking for a husband without success. She doesn't seem particularly distraught, though - just cheerfully optimistic.
- Other Me Annoys Me: When adult Morgane is talking to a younger version of herself (well, dreaming about it), neither one of them is particularly impressed. Young Morgane had hoped to grow up prettier and Adult Morgane thinks her younger self is a brat.Young Morgane: If I'm honest, I'm a little disappointed.
[...]
Adult Morgane: I don't ever remember myself being this obnoxious. - Our Werebeasts Are Different: Father Jérôme, on Crab Island, worried about werecrabs, though we see no evidence they actually exist.
- Party in My Pocket: Players sometimes have crew members appear in the inventory alongside regular items, and can use on world objects in the same way. The crew member then shows up and does something.
- Passed-Over Promotion: First mate Diego's grumbling about Alessandro letting his daughter act as captain points to him being dissatisfied in his position, and his loyalty is questioned when it's revealed he's been associating with a rival captain. He says otherwise; he'd never betray his captain, but believes that Alessandro has a "blind spot" about Morgane's ability to handle the job. And that turns out to be his genuine reason - he stays loyal, and becomes less grumpy about Morgane.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Tanner's password for revealing the location of Turtle Island is easy enough for Morgane to eventually guess: it's "Carmine", the name of his dead wife.
- Pirate Booty: The Golden Turtle is generally assumed to be either this or a source of this. It's actually... a turtle. Well, a spirit in the form of one.
- Pirate Girl: Morgane, naturally. As a kid, she's of the "cute" kind. Grown up, she's tougher, but still generally nicer than you'd expect from pirates.
- Pirate Parrot: Uncle Eduardo turns out to be one when we eventually meet him.
- The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The topic comes up.
- Morgane is initially surprised that her father wants to take on cargo, thinking it's the wrong job for pirates, but is mollified when he says he means dangerous, maybe-illicit cargo.
- It's noted that Razzo probably needs to work on his piratical instincts. ("Isn't this stealing?")
- Punctuation Shaker: One of the Atabey chiefs is named Chemi'n, and when Morgane has to write his name in blood for a ritual, she mentions that she'll need to take extra care to get the spelling right.
- Real After All: Morgane, on learning that Dinsdale thinks he's seen a ghost, successfully tricks him and his brother with a fake Bedsheet Ghost. However, she then finds out that Dinsdale's original ghost wasn't his imagination.
- Relationship Sabotage: Chief Chemi'n doesn't want his cousin Tana to hook up with Chief Bajari, and so convinces the clueless-about-love Bajari that any "weird feelings" Bajari gets when thinking about Tana are an illness caused by Tana putting a curse on him. Morgane sets him right.
- Reflexive Response: Diego has spent so long as first mate that, when he's knocked out, yelling a captain-on-deck call makes him reflexively stand up, salute, report, and collapse again.
- Right Under Their Noses: It turns out that Anita's missing outlaw husband and the mysterious, scarred stranger sitting in her bar are one and the same. He didn't want to reveal himself because firstly, he's still wanted by the law; and secondly, he thought Anita would reject him because of his disfigurement.
- Romancing the Widow: Anita, a bar proprietor whose husband hasn't been seen in years, seems to be suggesting this in saying that Morgane's father would get a "warm welcome" should he renew their acquaintance. Morgane seems to think so, judging by how she awkwardly insists that her father wouldn't be able to make it. The invitation is presumably off when Anita learns that the mysterious stranger in her bar is actually her still-alive husband... a fact which explains why the stranger wasn't too keen on Anita meeting Morgane's father either.
- Scarecrow Solution: Morgane does this twice. First, she fakes a ghost to scare off two thugs she needs to get past. Later, she constructs a mask to briefly impersonate an angry spirit.
- The Scrooge: Morgane says that Guzman the banker's "stinginess is legendary throughout the Caribbean." (We never actually meet him in this game, though - he's in So Blonde).
- Seadog Peg Leg: Morgane's childhood home has a rack of them, left from prominent pirate ancestors. She doesn't have one herself, although Simpkins, one of the villains, does.
- Sequel Hook - The reward Morgane and her father get at the end of the game implies further adventures, as does the fact that Simpkins is shown escaping from the island. That said, the fact that Wizarbox is defunct means that it's uncertain whether any more games will be made.
- Shout-Out: From time to time.
- When Morgane is boasting to Briscoe about her ship's speed, she echoes Han Solo's claims about the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. There's another Star Wars shout-out in the flag of Bounty Island, which features a shape remarkably like the helmet of Bounty Hunter Boba Fett.
- There's a rocky outcropping on one of the islands that looks like the famous one from The Lion King (1994), complete with rocks resembling Rafiki presenting Simba.
- Spicy Latina: Morgane fits some aspects of this, but on the whole, she's probably a bit too laid-back to be more than a mild example.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Some people initially have trouble with the idea of Morgane as a female captain, but it doesn't last.
- Stealth Insult: Morgane isn't sure if Manuel has complimented her looks or insulted them while claiming not to recognise her.Manuel: And I usually remember beautiful women.
Morgane: Is that a compliment or an insult? - Sword and Gun: Averted to the point of being subverted. Morgane gets a nice sword and a pistol quite early in the name, but never once uses them for their intended purpose. The sword is used to cut shrubbery and fabric, while the pistol spends most of its time without gunpowder and ammunition, being used occasionally as a hammer. Then, finally, some gunpowder is acquired and the pistol is fired... only once, to scare some seagulls.
- Taking the Bullet: Tanama, a young Turtle Island girl, jumps in front of a spear to protect Morgane. In the end, once Morgane installs a new Great Turtle, the Turtle not only heals Tanama but makes her the new shaman.
- Talk Like a Pirate: Not a big feature. Morgane and her family have Spanish accents, fitting their roots. Most other characters have British accents of some sort, but not necessarily the West Country ones that tend to be thought of as "pirate" accents.
- The Team Benefactor: Thomas Briscoe, the wealthiest merchant on Bounty Island, funds the expedition Morgane leads after the Golden Turtle. He accompanies the ship, and sometimes tries to accompany Morgane himself (although tends to get a very short way before saying he'll "just stay here for a while" - which Morgane generally thinks would be best anyway).
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Morgane and her father's first mate, Diego, don't much get along, but find common ground on the need to get Morgane's father to come to terms with his wife's death. The teamwork gets less forced after they succeed at that.
- Tomboy: Morgane, as a kid. Still somewhat when she's grown, although her outfit isn't tomboyish.
- Treasure Map: Several of them, some needing to be combined.
- Tree Top Town: The Atabey native village Morgane visits is built like this. (Although it seems other villages aren't, since one of Chief Bajari's guards says he couldn't live up there.)
- Trophy Room: When Morgane is pleased with herself for catching a firefly, Rizzo sarcastically suggests she start displaying her trophies on the walls of her cabin.
- True Companions: Diego, who has been Captain Alessandro's first mate "for ever", says that the loyalty he has isn't something that Morgane is in a position to understand. He's particularly incensed at the idea that his association with Simpkins means he's being disloyal.Diego: The Captain is like a brother to me and I'd never betray him. I'd sooner cut off my own leg!
- Upper-Class Twit: While not as bad as he could be, Thomas Briscoe has elements of this. His expedition to find the Golden Turtle isn't particularly well planned, and he doesn't contribute much insight to it - he's more likely to need rescuing. He's not malicious or snobbish, however.
- Unfinished Business: The ghost of Bonita Castillo, Morgane's mother, can't move on yet but it's not so much her own business that's unfinished as that of her husband, who won't accept her death and get on with his own life. Only when that's done can she go.
- Unsuspectingly Soused: Morgane deals with Dinsdale and Mitchell by giving them alcohol which is far stronger than they'd guess (it's used for cleaning).
- What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Chief Bajari, while not unaware of the concept of love, has difficulty applying it to himself, being unable to identify the reason he feels so strange when interacting with Tana. Chief Chemi'n has convinced him that the reason he gets anxious even thinking about her is that she has put a curse on him. Morgane can set him right on that issue.
- Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Not really the point of the game, despite it's pirate theme. Much more is seen of the islands visited than of any ships.
- Working the Same Case: Morgane's father wants her to do what Briscoe is paying them to do, but Morgane also wants to try to look for Uncle Eduardo, too. It turns out that Uncle Eduardo has a vital clue for Briscoe's mission, so solving one mystery is necessary for pursuing the other.
