Return to Monkey Island

I bought this game on Steam on release, and have regretted it ever since. If you've ever played the developer's other games, such as Monkey Island 2 or Thimbleweed Park, you know that the developer HATES game endings; to the point where in this one, he just gave up entirely, and didn't even bother. The game just stops midway through a chase scene. Not even a cliff hanger! It just ends. After this, the developer leaves a message in the game saying "Games shouldn't have an ending, as it's the journey, not the destination that matters!". Honestly, I don't care what the dev thinks! Imagine if Star Wars just ended when they got to the Death Star. That's what this feels like. There's zero pay off. Check out the video review of this game by The Escapist. They sum it up pretty well. Most annoyingly, the game is now on Gamepass... so I could have saved myself the money if I had just waited 2 months. Very annoyed. Will never buy another game by this troll of a developer.

The artstyle is adequate for what the game writing and story are. And I don't mean it in a nice way. Yeah, it's an absolute disaster visually, ugly with cheap flashlike skeletal animations. It's small, both in scope and in lenght - it has no breadth. It's empty. Just compare the islands in act IV with the islands in Monkey Island 2. There is no Caribbean to be found here. The puzzles are easy and not particularly well designed or interesting, some of them also have small hints on how to solve them (like seeing a blowfish while going down the anchor). The interface... well, I hate those barebone interfaces designed for tablets and little kids at their first P&C experience. And the writing. Oh my god. I said the art style is adequate... because it's a full fledged low tier nickelodeon cartoon. It's silly through and through. Forget On Stranger Tides. It's not a pirate story anymore, it's a cartoon. LeChuck - from a scary ghost pirate - became a caricature, Elaine is utterly destroyed, as is everyone else. Cartoon caricatures. And the writing. Pretentious overall. I'm convinced that in 30 years Ron got sick of people asking him about Monkey Island (and a secret that never existed) and started to resent his creature. Now it's a meta story on growing old and the likes. I don't even feel bad about the ending like most people (I LOVED MI2 ending), but... AGAIN? Not that I was expecting anything different due to all the clues during the game. Gilbert had no idea what to do with this game, scratched everything he planned and thought (his famous 17 points and "Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there") and destroyed his creature. The music is also disappointing. I mean, it's good but... it's the bare minimum. They just basically gave an orchestration to the old tunes. And it's overdone and overcomplicated, in 1 year no one will remember those tunes, while we still perfectly remember every song in MI1 30 years later.

I don't mind the new graphics style at all and the initial impression is that welcome feeling "ah, I'm back in a real Monkey Island game!". Unfortunately, bit by bit, it unravels. There are too many scenes where the dialogue choices just don't matter, including a trashing of the original lovely idea of insult swordfighting. The beloved old characters frequently don't feel like themselves. It's occasionally funny, but not witty. There's a potentially interesting theme where Guybrush drifts from amiable idiot who messes things up by accident, to man who is so driven to find The Secret that he doesn't care how much damage he does on the way... then the game just abandons it. Elaine is reinvented from sharp damsel who doesn't need rescuing.... to simpering idiot. At the end, Ron Gilbert personally appears in the guise of Stan to say how annoyed he is that you still like Monkey Island, and if YOU can't let go of liking Monkey Island then YOU can turn out the damn lights in the rubbish theme park. Don't buy this game. Burn this game.

Throughout the game, there's an underlying sense of something being not quite right, and not in the fourth wall-breaking way the series is known for. Knowing the series' original idea and Gilbert's proclivities, I was prepared to be disappointed, but hoped for the best. Right off the bat, that hope felt somewhat vindicated. Despite having its own story to tell, the game makes an effort to include the previous iterations and whip up an unreliable narrator-driven hodgepodge to establish a continuity of sorts that might please those who played and are fond of them. The art style was impossible to get over. Like all other chapters, this one has its own visual identity, but it just never grew on me, well crafted and expressive as it was in certain moments. It's just too "indie" - more in the trying-too-hard-to-be-different than the experimental sense of the term. There are no new memorable characters to speak of, made worse by the fact that some are narrative devices rather than individuals. Voice acting is probably the weakest in the series - the staple actors deliver, but LeChuck's replacement falls completely flat. For all his earnest effort, he was let down by the sound design, as his voice has no real texture to speak of and has a dissonant effect when the screen shakes as he screams (or, rather, slightly raises his voice). There's nothing to give his tone a much-needed oomph in those moments. And most of the female voice acting is either blase, uninterested or faux gravelly. The humor is there, but more in a nostalgic chuckle mood, with the odd guffaw to be had. As such, the game is a pleasant journey through a selection of Monkey Island elements, but feels more like a by-the-numbers appeasement rather that a cohesive narrative, and ends up being a MI2 rehash by way of a self-serving closing of a chapter from the developer's part - a somewhat biased "choose your own ending" that is more than a bit anticlimactic, but at least a relief of sorts for the fans.