My favorite Monkey Island stories aren’t about a puzzle, a character, or a joke. Not Stan and his sign language, nor the severed head that guides you through the maze. This isn’t actually the story of the game itself. This is related to a friend of my wife’s. This friend once confessed that when she was a child, whenever she had a story to tell her mother, her mother always stopped her from the beginning and said, I guess it was a heavy and deep sigh, “Is this about Monkey Island? ”
I thought a lot. A kid so in love with Monkey Island, he talks about it with such detail and endless enthusiasm that makes their mom wary of every fresh conversation. To this day, whenever I’m particularly bored, my wife stops me by saying, “Is this about Monkey Island?” The conversation ends. Conversation failed.
Interestingly, of course, if there’s any game worth mentioning, it’s Monkey Island.Let me clarify: a lot of games are worth talking about, but Monkey Island – the first one – is unique in its value Tell people about. What happened in that game was unprecedented in the early 1990s. Its scope, the richness of its Caribbean setting, the lightness of its comedic tone. But there are also set pieces. The fact that the fourth wall was acknowledged and then shattered. When students play this game at night and on weekends, almost realizing they are the game characters of the game characters – are they forced to say what they realize they didn’t choose to say? Well, it feels almost illegal.Math Room at 9am Monday: You won’t Believe What happened last night at Monkey Island.
By the way, Monkey Island is an adventure game or point and click game that triggers a series of adventure games. You know the trade: collect items, engage in conversations, and solve problems by using A and B. Keep going. up, out. In the past, it was the most lavish genre – it was a lavish genre. How many different locations are there? How many characters? How many puzzles are there? How many dialogue options are there? This is the type where developers pour all their investment into. The basics are set – using A and B – but a lot of other stuff is constantly being modified between games. Important genre fields are up for grabs. Should you be able to die in an adventure game? Should you have programming problems? How persistent should the player be in order for it to still count, e.g., Gameplay?
Monkey Island rules here. Eight blue disks and, if I remember correctly, a code disk, copy-protected every time. Then you load it up and you’re in the best video game world imaginable: the Caribbean in the age of pirates, sure, but some of those pirates are zombies! And jokes! Everyone is so funny!
Oh joke. The joke that turns swordsmanship into a mutually insulting game, which means it works as a mechanic, is also fun. Hidden Puzzle Joke: What to Do With Red Herring in Inventory? Apparently a joke made by real people with their own cultural lives and touchstones. Most importantly, the jokes that make you realize that adventure games are really stupid, full of sudden limitations and contradictions, but the jokes in turn make you realize that it’s this type of stupidity that makes it so good. Monkey Island is extraordinary.
In a way, the sequel is also good. I even like the third one, which is obviously the work of a slightly different team, but it delivers a light-hearted story and huge puzzles while deftly navigating the nostalgia that the series has fallen behind. When the third game came out, I was still in college — it was an era of self-reflection, an era of screaming, and movies about movies were full of dialogue about dialogue. The third Monkey Island ends with a theme park ride that tells the story of the first two games while also being a nice puzzle. If Baudrillard played, he would have been moved to an article or two. I almost got myself wet.
Now, Monkey Island is back. Back to Monkey Island! Another old-fashioned adventure game about using A and B, recreated by the team of Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman. (Tim Schafer is sad to leave, but he’s busy, who can blame him?) A fitting home! Guess what, it’s a thing with huge charm. Luxury, quilted, velvety nostalgia.
I’m grateful that I’m late here switching to new games — even by my unreliable standards. But the thing is, I might argue that it’s thematic, or even harmonious. Because “Return to Monkey Island” fell deeply and deeply in love with the first monkey island, the secret of monkey island. Fall in love with it, fascinated by it, in tune with its famous beat and stroke. Of course, it veers off course and adds its own glorious new addition to the series, including at least one great new character and some sparkling new islands, I won’t spoil any of that. But from the start, it felt like a string of precious trinkets dropped into the kind of magical voodoo cooking pot that’s often found in these games. Casting spells. Spiritual successor? The spiritual part is right. It’s almost an attempt to summon the bright ghosts of the past.
I’ll honestly try to break the basics. Guybrush Threepwood, an admirer of Judge Rheinhold pirates, is back, this time eager to truly crack the secrets of Monkey Island. He’s back at Melee Island, the best spot in the series. night. The lookout remains blind. Guybrush is still looking for a boat and a crew, and – to be honest – a little planning. He knew what he wanted: treasure. But he didn’t know how to get it. So you go.
A word on the interface. This is the experience! It’s fun to play the Monkey Island games in turn and see how the adventure game interface evolves. list of verbs? Verb list with picture list? A magical doubloon attached to a cursor? The reward is a simplicity that comes from time and understanding. A pointer you move across the screen, a selection of clearly marked interactive elements that basically use labels between them, and an inventory that allows you to select objects and place them with whatever you want to combine. Contextual button prompts tell you what you can and cannot do, and conversations can be skipped or repeated. It’s a game that wants to get out of as much trouble as possible.
The interface doesn’t get in the way, it’s the dogfight island you always remember, right down to the layout of the streets and the way the screens are put together. If you knew how to get to the Governor’s Palace back in 1992, you can still get there today. And so, the great overlay begins: memories of old games overlaid on the scene of the game you’re playing now, or vice versa. Memories are intertwined with the present.
No spoilers. Puzzles are good. I like the way they work – they often boil down to combining A with B – but I like the way they are installed and contextualized. Through the medium of A and B, you can make friends, destroy the environment, subvert traditions, and ruin lives. You have won your enemies, fought against those who trusted you, and reveled in the glorious adventure of being an idiot pirate.
A and B are always smart, usually depending on the improper or unlikely use of the object in a given situation. You look at your inventory and think, what is this item, but what could it be used for unexpectedly? Dorothy Parker talks disciplined eyes and wild mind: It shows she’ll be great on Monkey Island
It takes a while for the story to reveal itself. I can at least say it does a great job of giving you warm familiar things and places to visit before opening things up and taking you to places that feel new but also complete. When the game actually opens, there can be quite a bit of backtracking, but even this is simple and takes you right back to the map screen with a single button. It’s a game born out of the setbacks of an adventure game. Challenges remain, but friction has been removed.
(On that note: Marvel at the hint system that takes you through the game if you want. Not only does it provide staggered hints, a series of nudges before giving a full solution, it’s also contextual – it’s able to track where you go where you’ve been and what you’ve got so it adjusts its recommendations perfectly. What a thing!)
Variety? The art of Rex Crowle gives the series a whole new approach, but to me, it fits the game and its history perfectly. If such a thing is possible, we’re in a texture-flat world here. The backdrop is a thin but detailed stage set, and the overall atmosphere is dark and haunted, as if Mary Blair was around when Disney made Pinocchio. Crowle loves angular, zig-zag shapes—cracks in the ground, split trees, rocky paths through lava—and often builds an entire location around them. In the slanted angles and the glow of Halloween pumpkins emanating from every window, there is a great imagination: LeChuck’s boat is lined with vents on the stern, giving way to a hellish red, as if Satan was himself Handling propulsion. Forests at night are angular leaves clinking in sheer shadow: you never know where the ground is falling, or what creatures might be lurking out of sight.
The character art is unsettling in close-up—button-eyes, scribbled hair, manes and shapes like middle-aged soap bars—but they are a reminder that Monkey Island’s character art has always been unsettling. Do you remember your first conversation at the Scumm bar, where the in-game boxing and Judy models suddenly gave way to the stark realism of close-ups? It always gives me chills, like the carefully sketched, abstract doodles in Return’s art. Take Crowle’s Guybrush himself for example: stubble; wild hair; somehow, a bit of a Bono vibe. It’s a lot warmer than a sitcom voiced by Dominic Armato. But that’s the point. In juxtaposition, it creates something interesting. It used to be, in its own way.
What Return’s occasionally lacking is bold hilarity, like the gopher horde sequence in the first Monkey Island, which is played out of sight of the player behind the wall, and all moves unfold using automatic interface cues to suggest a disaster It gets wilder and wilder, layer upon layer, until the game can barely control it. In other words, what’s missing is the playful spirit of the early games, which often seems to push the boundaries of the genre itself.
But the genre was young at the time, and it was perhaps a more productive thing to oppose it. It’s happier to go back to Monkey Island just to celebrate what it is – it’s hard to blame it. It’s generous, and it wants old fans to feel comfortable and appreciated — and happily challenged.
Reader: Valid. There are some nostalgic moments here that really touch me, and one that makes me want to call a classmate I haven’t spoken to in thirty years to tell them about it.Office, Monday morning at 9 am, the switchboard dials a name you can only vaguely remember: you won’t Believe What happened last night at Monkey Island.
