... but that idea was dumped very quickly. After a few "click on this door" actions, the game turns into a VN. The plot ist ok, one can restore the relationships he likes right at the beginning, but it would often make so much more sense if people called each other by name. The story starts interesting enough, but is quite shallow, nothing out of the ordinary, there is not much depth in it other than getting someone into someone elses pants and a few pranks. What's fun is that both main characters think that they are tricking each other, not knowing that the other saw behind most of the scheeme the whole time and just plays along trying to get the upper hand. If the writers didn't let the characters use alcohol and drugs to get to their goal, it would have been fun to explore this further. Sadly after a while it all changes to the worse, at some point the former all so shy Mia ends up on a stripper pole to earn money for a dress ... yep, that bad. And she is also willing to do kinky stuff on cam for money. Either the creators got a new imbecille writer at that point or they started to listening to every nonsense their patreons wanted. From that point it gets worse and worse, the story just doesn't make much sense anymore. It's all about blackmailing and betrayal, who betrays who with whom and uses what evidence to gain what. Optionally also some kinky scenes featuring other male characters (here called 'NTR' which does not really fit) can be activated, but most of them seem to be completely out of place and it looks as if they were only included to please a certain faction of their patreons. **SPOILER** In the end Mia grows some kind of conscience and ends it all, leaving an open end for Season 2. The 'game' was remade partially, but sadly it's mostly the first half. The quality of the second halfs renders drops significantly. Also when deciding that it would be a VN instead of a sandbox game they should have changed the intro as well, turning it into a 100% VN.
I knew this game was about time travel and a repeating day but somehow I expected little more than a visual novel. After the introduction however the player gets more freedom. What's really done well is the hint system. The MC messes up, thinks about it and gets an idea how to do it better, meaning that new options get unlocked. In other cases, when the MC gets basically a door in his face, the game just fast forwards a full day, so the conversation can be tried again. That takes out the grind factor out of the game very efficiently. It's possible of course to be a dick and play pranks to see some fun reactions, but to move forward in the story, one needs to be the nice guy most of the time, which I really can relate to. The female charcters are fully voiced, as far as I can tell, but there's only two voice actresses, who are not really good at using different voices for each character. But it's somthing. But since MCs answers are only available in text form you still have to keep the eyes on the bottom of the screen if you are interested in the conversations. The time travel structure is by far not as complex as in a certain other time traveling VN which may or may not make it to GOG some day, but it's still fun to experiment and see, how many different outcomes the writers could come up with.
The journey is this game's true prize I wasn't thrilled by the idea that Gilbert made it sound as if he wanted to ignore the last three games for the story of this one. Good news: he didn't, he acknowledged their existence, there are some references to the later games as well ... and of course there's Murray. The story starts innocent, Guybrush is on a race with Lechuck, on his quest causing collateral damage like never before ... but in the end I felt something was missing. Remember that passage The Dark Tower where Stephen King tells you to stop reading before Roland reaches the tower? (Of course you don't, who reads books these days?) That might have been a good warning in RoMI as well. The whole time it's hinted that Guybrush and Lechuck are not so different after all, so one would think that they had a big scene together in the end, but that part was completely left open. In the end I was not like "Oh, he got me good! Haha!" ... it was more like "Oh no, not again ..." The riddles are mostly rather easy, I only had difficulties with a few of them. The controls are ok, except for somem minor issues with the inventory (and why the heck does the game menu open with 'o' instead of 'Esc'?). The voice acting is as good as we know it from the other games, the music is great. Like in Woodtick in MI2 the same track plays with different instrument when you wander around a scene. The variations of the old themes are nice as well. The graphics ... well, they are what they are. As probably everyone else I miss the pseudo realistic look from the first games, that tehy felt like right out of a pirate movie poster. So I was not all too keen of the new look, when I first saw it. When playing the game however, it's a different thing, they actually fit quite well, most of the time. It's the era of Switch games, we have to live with that. I thought about giving only 4 stars, but then I stuck with 5. After all I had a good time and most of the time the game had the right feeling.
... but it really could use a "HD" mode. There is just no reason for our eyes to hurt like back in N64 times. Add an optional mode to play the game in at least 1080p and with Anti-Aliasing and is as good as bought.
