I grew up playing adventure games in the early 90's and for decades I hoped we'd one day get Ron's conclusion to Monkey Island. Now, I have mixed feelings about the game. I wish Ron and Dave would've chosen to disregard everything after MI2, which I know they considered initially. I wish Ron would've chosen to go with pixel-art like he did a few years ago. I'm on the 90's pixels camp and even favour no voice acting. I never played the Special Editions. I was not a fan of the cartoony look they used on Curse either. I think the main argument in favour of the classic style is that it leaves a lot of room for the imagination. It also makes everything feel more intimate. The game's a bit short. Puzzles are rather easy and there's even a hint book in our inventory. But wasn't frustration part of the experience, back when the internet wasn't even there yet? Perhaps we who played the two original games as kids wanted to play the game we would've played in '92 or '93, but maybe Monkey Island was bigger than that and was supposed to be sort of a reflection of our lives: in some ways we're the same we were back then, but in many ways we aren't anymore. I know Ron and Dave feel this way after reading their scrapbook letter. I liked the ending. The originally intended ending, the secret, is there. The story goes in the direction many of us had suspected; the hints were all there. The reveal adds another dimension to it, making it about imagination and about ourselves. The "new" ending(s) expand on that and leave room for different interpretations as a reflection on the nature of the secret itself and people's expectations. In any case, Monkey Island "3a" could only be the game Ron decided to make. Anything different, anything else would've been... well, something else. As I said, I have mixed feelings about Return to Monkey Island – but perhaps this is the way it was supposed to be. "Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not." – Heraclitus
The best thing about "Escape from Monkey Island" is that we can just pretend it never happened.
Good game but unfortunately too woke. It became annoying to the degree that it took me out of it. I tried to mitigate its effect and enjoy the game by telling myself that it was a dystopian future where "anything goes" but it didn't really work. The game starts and one of the protagonists is a young woman of colour. No problem there. Then you find out another one of the protagonists (old "stuck in his ways" white dude) was in an interracial couple. Ok. Then there's another couple in the game who are not only interracial but also gay. Okkk....... Then another one of the protagonists, asian girl (or so we thought) turns out to be trans ....... Then there's this black guard who happens to be the nicest guy in the whole world. Then (if you read the news bits) there's a comment about Japan choosing to preserve their culture and how that's "ethno-fascism". Yes, the game calls it "ethno-fascism". Then there's this lab where the person in charge is a black female, the rest of the scientists are the Indian lady and the asian lady, the old "stuck in his ways" white guy and the other white guy in the game who is of course the evil villain. Then I kinda just lost interest. Some people will say that I am the problem. Well, I disagree. When you have force diversity like this and there's a clear bias to it, it just becomes annoying and tells me the focus of the developers was misplaced.
