The Curse of Monkey Island™

I know this game is oddly beloved by many, but sad to say, it's really not very good, and absolutely pales in comparison with its predecessors. While the art and sound are fantastic (aside from Guybrush's awful new look), the jokes are often weak, the puzzles mostly unimpressive, and the world claustrophobically small. It's not a bad game, but it's such a catastrophic drop from the perfection of MI1 and 2 that it comes off much worse that it actually is. Worst aspect: the long, painfully boring, incredibly unfunny, un-challenging, extremely derivative section of rhyming-insult-sword-fighting. The designers took what had been a stroke of pure genius from the first game and rehashed it into an agonizingly slow exercise in insipidity. Make sure you bring a pillow with you as you snore through the repetitive animations and poor line-readings of lame rhymes that hardly qualify as jokes as you slowly build up your arsenal of comebacks and weaponry in a dumbed down combination of MI1 and Sid Meier's Pirates. The other big issue is simply the difficult transition that Adventure games struggled with at this time as they were forced to shift from the format of reading dialogue to having it voice-acted. Really, nothing did more to kill the genre than this shift, as you're left with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs as voice-actors of extremely varying quality slowly read lines that you could have read yourself far quicker (and better in your own mind. Plus no matter how good the acting, it's always hard to reconcile the way voice-actors portray characters with the way you'd been hearing them in your own head for years already. Sigh. Such a shame. Still, the game is not without its merits. There are fun bits sprinkled here and there, even a few inspired moments. And of course, there's Murray - easily the best thing about MI in its post-Gilbert era. Play it yes. But don't expect to love it.

GOOD BUT NOT FOR EVERYONE -if you are a hardcore fan of the genre you'll probably love it, if not, the "logic" behind the puzzles is too convoluted, I can't picture making any meaningful progress without permanently reading a walkthrough. It starts all right, and I liked it; but very quickly you need to resort to a walkthrough, the alternative is clicking every single pixel to make sure you didn't miss anything (it happened to me in the 2nd room in the game) or trying everything with everything until something works. The "logic" is too far-fetched, almost random, and I played in the "regular" difficulty. BAD FIRST GAME -a very basic game for everyone is Dark Side Detective; another classic, "normal" point-and-click that's way more accessible than this is Grim Fandango. If you thought Grim Fandango was hard or nuts stay away from this. AGED WELL -this is the "original" version from 1997, not a remaster, but it plays ok. The cartoonish graphics are somewhat pixelated (specially the characters) but look decent on a big monitor; the voice acting and sound are good too. I didn't play the earlier games so I can't compare, but this is a good "classic" point-and-click. The reason I didn't score it higher is because sometimes objects blend with the background and get lost, and not because of the resolution but of the coloring; and because you can't skip ahead in dialogues. You can choose speech and/or subtitles, but even with speech turned off the timing of the subtitles follows the timing of the speech, so you are forced to wait a small eternity after reading the subtitles to continue with the dialog, in a game where many conversations are just for "flavor". The humor is just ok, so is the writing. READ THE MANUAL -there's little help in-game and some of the controls aren't intuitive. DESERVES ITS REPUTATION AS A CLASSIC but unless you have played it before or love punishment (or playing with a walkthrough in your lap) you should think twice before getting it.

suck

Warning! The game doesn't save on Macbook pro M1

The humor and story are pretty well done. There are jokes galore and the story makes a certain kind of sense until the Big-lipped Alligator that is the final act. Unfortunately, like many of the games in this genre, the puzzles are ridiculously obtuse at times. A clever solution should leave you saying, "I should have thought of that!" when you finally get it (or look it up). Far too many puzzles had me saying, "I'm supposed to do what?!" It's worth a play if you like the story - though it goes on a little too long - but the puzzling aspect is entirely forgettable.