Flight of the Amazon Queen: Joe King vs. Doctor Frank Ironstein

A point-and-click adventure that stakes everything on the playbook of '40s adventure movies — and the reviews show just how far the gag lands.

A pilot named Joe King

You play Joe King, pilot of the Amazon Queen — and the name is fair warning that nobody here means to take anything seriously. The job starts simple: fly the actress Faye Russel to her next shooting location. It turns dangerous when King's rival, the Flying Dutchman, cuts across his path, and the two of them stumble into the scheme of Doctor Frank Ironstein, a mad scientist bent on ruling the world from deep in the Amazon jungle. Along the way: a hostile temple and Amazon warriors happy to make every step harder.

The game bills itself as an heir to the '40s adventure serials, all B-movie flavor: a wisecracking hero, a lab-coated scientist reaching for the world, a forest full of traps. It's a point-and-click adventure of the sort that asks you to explore every scene, pick up every object and try combinations until the puzzle gives — more than a hundred different scenes and more than forty characters along the way. Every line is voiced, by a cast that brings together Brad Lavelle, Tom Hill, Bill Hootkins, Enn Reitel, Penelope Keith, Jon Coleman and Debbie Arnold, among others.

The game is signed by the studio Interactive Binary Illusions and distributed by Red Sprite Studios; it landed on GOG on September 20, 2013.

The same name turns up write-up after write-up: LucasArts

The people who wrote during its release week, in September 2013, were already nailing down the comparison that recurs in nearly every write-up: the game recalls the LucasArts classics, above all Monkey Island and the Indiana Jones saga. They praise the careful artwork, the soundtrack and the deliberately cheap humor — the kind of joke that knows it's a joke.

The same people, though, flag the same stumble: the icon-based commands, which call for repeated clicking just to open a door. If you've already run through dozens of adventures in the genre, you'll recognize the puzzle logic without effort — for a newcomer, the challenge lasts longer. A 2022 write-up adds another gripe: the character's pace is slow, and that wears on you more than any hard puzzle.

Some go beyond the technical tally: a 2020 write-up notes that the studio never released another game after this one, and regrets that the list stopped there.

For those who memorized the LucasArts script, and for those who've never seen this icon

After so many write-ups pointing to the same place, the math adds up easily. If you've finished a Monkey Island, you'll recognize the script the moment the Amazon Queen takes off, and you'll laugh at the pun in the pilot's name right away. If you've never gone near a point-and-click adventure, you'll find it strange to answer the world with icons alone, and you'll feel every slow step of the character as one more obstacle.

The game asks no prior knowledge of the series, but it does demand patience with an interface that was born dated. For anyone who takes that deal, the Amazon jungle and Doctor Frank Ironstein deliver a joke that's rarely silly, and the fully voiced cast holds the scene. For anyone who wants a quick answer and a direct command, this isn't the way in.