Conquistadorio

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Conquistadorio, released in 2023 on PC, then ported to PlayStation 4 in 2024, and then to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2025, is a Graphic Adventure in the “Point and Click” style where players take the role of an animated bony corpse of a Spanish conquistador, awakened from his eternal slumber to find himself in a strange and seemingly alien world, with the conquistador heading out in search of a fresh coffin so he can find rest again. Or maybe he wants to find The Holy Grail? It’s not quite clear.

The art design for this game’s 2D hand-painted world is really outstanding, making it seem dank and foreboding, but also quiet, lonely, and old, full of spiky scenery and rotting houses long forgotten. It’s so well-crafted that it’s kinda’ a shame that the game’s more cartoony characters feel out of place in it. These visuals are joined by a fittingly subdued atmospheric soundtrack as well as mumbly noises in place of character speak (with their communication portrayed by pictures in speech bubbles.

When it comes to the gameplay, Conquistadorio does have a good idea in providing players with two different types of hints – one that theoretically points out a point of interest in the environment, and one that requires completing a mini-game, but when completed will tell players how to solve the current puzzle from start to finish. The problem here is that these solutions provide far too little and arguably way too much – if you just want to know what the “hot spots” in the environment are, the game doesn’t seem to have a command for that. Likewise, if you just want to know the very next task, the game won’t tell you that. The “point of interest” hint just seems to point out random hot spots in the environment, which may not be helpful because it repeats before showing you all of them. So if you need a little push, it seems your only options are one hint that barely helps at all, and another that solves the whole puzzle for you.

However, even if we weren’t looking at the busted hint system and lack of hotspot indicator, this game still has issues. This game does seem to occasionally use “Sierra Logic”, with puzzle solutions that don’t always make sense. In the first puzzle, for example, you need to place a cannonball in a pair of manacles and use it as a flail, even though it seems highly unlikely that a cannonball would fit in a pair of actual manacles, and your character can swing around the manacles just fine if you needed a melee weapon to hit something (he even swings them around in this manner if you try to do so).

Another problem is that the game’s cursor is far too slow, as is your character’s walking speed, and while the game claims there is a shortcut for the item menu, I couldn’t get this to work, nor did there seem to be a shortcut for any of the other menu options like the hint systems.

The result is that Conquistadorio looks gorgeous (mostly), but is a tedious, frustrating slog to play, with a cursor that moves at a snail’s pace and a hint system that takes a great idea and executes it extremely poorly. If you’re a fan of the genre with an immense amount of patience this game’s wonderful artwork may entice you to give it a look, but otherwise I suggest you skip it.

tl;dr – Conquistadorio is a Graphic Adventure in the “Point and Click” style where players take the role of the animated corpse of a Spanish conquistador in a strange world seeking to return to his eternal sleep (or maybe find The Holy Grail). This game’s backgrounds are truly gorgeous, though the characters don’t quite seem to fit them. However, even worse is the tedious, slow gameplay and a hint system that either doesn’t help enough or helps far too much. Only the most dedicated fans of the genre should bother with this.

Grade: C-

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