When you look at it a certain way, the opening 10 minutes of Return to Monkey Island are an incredible meta-joke 30 years in the making. I have spoken at length about my hatred for the theme park ending of Monkey Island 2, which was the last time I touched a Monkey Island game made by Ron Gilbert¹, and various interviews in the run-up to the release of Return to Monkey Island didn’t do anything to shake my impression that Ron Gilbert has theme parks on the brain. This did not bode at all well for Return, and so my heart sank when the very first screen of Return that you see, 10 seconds after clicking that “New Game” button, is this:

Oh, no. If you’re not familiar with this screen, it’s a very direct and literal continuation from that much-loathed ending to Monkey Island 2. You’re controlling a miniature version of Guybrush as he runs around a theme park with his brother Chuckie, and Gilbert opens the game with some gross-out humour straight out of an Adult Swim animated show as you go into a toilet to look for money so that you can buy snacks. This is followed up by an actually-not-that-bad tutorial as the game teaches you how an adventure game works (if you’d somehow forgotten), but those first ten minutes looked almost exactly like the kind of game I was afraid Ron Gilbert² would make: that he wouldn’t be able to let go of the past, and that he’d just repeat his worst excesses from a series that was somehow already feeling pretty tired just one sequel in.

But Return is smarter than that. It’s so smart, in fact, that I can only see the decision to open the game with the ending from Monkey Island 2 as a deliberate fake-out aimed at forty-year-old Monkey Island series veterans, because it makes no sense otherwise. That goes for most of Return in general; I’ve seen it described as a love letter to the series, but I don’t think that quite captures what Return actually is. It is a game that seems almost exclusively targeted at people who played the original Secret of Monkey Island as kids back in the 90s, and who have since grown up and are now approaching — if not already fully entrenched in — middle age, and who want to revisit the classic adventure game series from their youth. Return delivers on this — but it’s far from a lazy nostalgia trip that simply includes all of the same locations and characters and jokes in a modern 2D point and click adventure game. I mean, it does do all of that, but the context in which it is presented to the player was quite unexpected. To me, anyway.

After spending the first ten minutes yanking my chain, Return to Monkey Island settled into a much more familiar routine. It’s an adventure game split into five parts, and once again stars Guybrush Threepwood as he makes yet another attempt to discover The Secret of Monkey Island. He starts the game in exactly the same place as he did Secret: on Melee Island, talking to the lookout on the hill in front of the big fire. But something’s very different this time around: this is a visibly older Guybrush, sporting a grey fuzz of stubble on the lower half of his face and some highlighting above his mouth that hints at laugh lines. He sounds older too, thanks to voice actor Dominic Armato also having aged along with Guybrush. Just like in Secret the first task he gets is to go to the SCUMM bar and talk to the pirate leaders, but when he gets there he’s in for a shock: the grizzled old pirate leaders from Secret have been forced out and replaced by a younger set of highly-qualified modern professionals who think he’s a joke, and who aren’t interested in the Secret at all beyond its monetary value. There are a couple of other leftovers from the old SCUMM bar like Cobb (AKA Mr “Ask Me About LOOM”) and the cook, who both bemoan the changing times but feel like they have no other choice but to go along with them.

Once you get out into Melee Island proper it’s a similar story: everything is the same, but different. The locations you can visit are identical to the ones in Secret (although Meathook’s and the sword trainer’s shacks have been removed from the map) but they all show signs of the relentless march of time. The Voodoo Lady’s shop is going out of business. The general store already has. The church is a boarded up derelict. Stan has been arrested for fraud and imprisoned in the jail, and all of his ships have been impounded. Elaine is no longer governor, having been replaced by Carla the Swordmaster. Her old shack is now the Museum of Pirate History, where items from Guybrush’s previous adventures are all treated as relics of a lost world straight out of a storybook, one which no longer exists.

Return has a slightly odd relationship to the other Monkey Island games. There’s a scrapbook accessible from the main menu that gives a three or four sentence description of each of 2, Curse, Escape and Tales, ostensibly for the purposes of catching you up on the story so far, but outside of the intro the only game that actually matters to the plot of Return is Secret. Every other game is ignored beyond the odd scattered reference here and there; in the case of Escape there are large portions of it that are indirectly retconned. Even 2 barely features beyond the intro, Guybrush’s blue jacket,  the returning character of Wally, and a joke about the Kate Capsize puzzle (of all the things to call out…).

And this is important for understanding what Return is, when you get down to it. It is very specifically a revisit of Secret of Monkey Island, and none of the other games — but it is a revisit, not a retread. The opening act of Return is the old saying about how you can never go home again, but in the form of a game. The world has moved on, and while Return has a sentimental streak a mile wide and does enjoy bringing back old characters simply for a one-off joke much like any other Monkey Island game would, this sentiment is tinged with a bit of uneasiness, or sadness. Video game protagonists are usually immortal and ageless — Mario would be drawing a pension by now if they weren’t — and the worlds they inhabit are similarly unchanging. If they do age, as the protagonists of series like Uncharted and the Assassin’s Creed Ezio trilogy do, then we at least get to see them do it in regular increments as successive games are released. It’s bittersweet to Return to Monkey Island after a 20 year absence and see every one of those 20 years all hitting at the same time.

(Before I get a bit too sentimental about this myself: some of this is my reading of the subtext of the game and will be coloured by, well, this being my exact experience with a lot of stuff in my life at the moment. However some of it is also outright stated as text by the writers of Return after you finish it, so it’s not entirely my own overactive imagination doing the work here.)

This acknowledgement of the passage of time is one half of what elevates Return above any other modern adventure game I’ve played. I think that if Return did try to just pick things up where they left off it’d be a much more mundane experience — just another Monkey Island game, for all that it’s been a long time since the last one. But it is trying to say something, to be a little more than a funny pirate adventure this time around, and while it occasionally does fall flat on its face I appreciate that it didn’t go for the safe option of just remaking Secret of Monkey Island all over again.

The other half of what makes Return stand out from other modern adventure games is its puzzle design. I have just finished playing through all 13 LucasArts adventures so I’d like to think I have a pretty good handle on what good puzzle design looks like now, and the puzzle design in Return is absolutely outstanding, some of the best I’ve ever seen. Hell, it might actually be the best I’ve ever seen in terms of challenging the player without frustrating them. It helps that it’s the beneficiary of a lot of work other games have done in terms of verbal hints and subtle signposting in object placement and descriptions that nudges you in the right direction; nevertheless, I can’t really think of an instance in Return where the solution to a problem wasn’t at least partly obvious after a few moments of prodding at it. But only partly, since a full solution usually requires visiting multiple areas to get all of the pieces, whether those be inventory items or nuggets of information from other characters, and it’s figuring out how exactly everything fits together that takes time. Part 4 of the game is a particular highlight for this, where the puzzles sprawl across multiple islands and locations and you have three or four puzzle strands to work on simultaneously. Sometimes I did get distracted and go off down a blind alley for up to ten minutes, but once I got the solution I never felt like it was cheap or illogical; the biggest crime Return commits is occasionally not making it obvious that certain characters have gone from a non-interactive to an interactive state, or bringing characters into one act of the game who aren’t relevant until the following act, and it doesn’t do it that often. Remarkably, I think Return is the first adventure game I’ve played that didn’t have a single instance of Adventure Game Logic in it. Not even Secret can say that.

I think this otherwise admirable focus on mostly-logical puzzle solutions does come with a tradeoff, though: Return has a decent sense of humour that fits with the drier tone of the original trilogy, and it did elicit a chuckle from me once or twice, but on the whole it’s not quite as funny as Secret or Curse. I’m not going to castigate it too much for falling short as those are both brilliant games with some very clever jokes buried inside them, and what’s present in Return is perfectly fine, especially since, having just finished Escape, I know that it could have been far, far worse. It’s just that, while the puzzle solutions in Return are logical, they’re also not particularly memorable. There’s nothing here on the level of the drowning puzzle in Secret, or the Game Over puzzle in Curse, and I felt that loss rather more keenly than I probably should have given that I tend to get really frustrated when “funny” puzzle design goes wrong (as with the monkey wrench puzzle in 2).

In terms of look and feel, I think Return falls into the “good, but not great” category. The game’s paper doll visual style was very polarising when it was first revealed and I was one of those who initially had a negative reaction to it, but I also remembered that I’d had the same reaction to Curse’s visuals in 1997 and I now think that it’s the best-looking adventure game ever made, so I resolved not to let Return’s graphical style dissuade me too much — and I was pleasantly surprised. Return’s characters and environments all look good — the redo of Melee Island and the locksmith’s shop are particular standouts — and are only slightly let down by the slightly primitive animations; the characters all look like paper dolls, and they move like them too. The real weak link is the close-ups the game goes for whenever it feels the need to provide the visuals with a bit more detail, as these usually end up achieving exactly the opposite as the game zooms in on Guybrush’s face and it becomes a blurry mess.

Return’s interface is an… interesting attempt to balance the stripped-down controls of modern adventure games with the tooltip humour of Monkey Island; in terms of controls the game only has “LOOK AT” on the left mouse button and “USE/PICK UP” on the right mouse button, but it will always give you a context-sensitive tooltip popup containing a description for the particular action you’re trying to accomplish, and the writers have fun with custom descriptions for a lot of otherwise pointless interactions. Double-click makes Guybrush move at double speed to your cursor location (although there’s no teleport-to-next-area behaviour here) and full stop skips through dialogue lines just as it did in SCUMM – you can even page back through dialogue history if you’ve skipped too much and think you missed something important. And while Return makes the mistake of having a screen-blocking inventory panel just as Curse did, it at least only blocks half of the screen this time instead of all of it, making it reasonably painless to deal with. It’s very pleasant to play, and while I don’t think that the tooltips quite work (I think it’s the font that bugs me most of all) I’m happier that Return attempted to come up with a solution that let it keep them instead of just throwing them away.

The sound, on the other hand, is a bit more hit and miss. I have absolutely no complaints about Return’s voice acting, which is delivered with great energy by a surprisingly high-powered cast who all fully grasp the mythical concept of “comic timing”. It’s the music, of all things, that lets Return down; Monkey Island is a series full of absolutely incredible music, where even the worst game had a soundtrack that would probably make my top 100 (I’ve been listening to Escape’s soundtrack a fair bit over the last week and it’s grown on me), and yet the best thing I can say about Return’s soundtrack is that it is there. It’s mostly a set of low-key orchestral remixes of other Monkey Island themes — Melee Island at night, Woodtick, LeChuck’s theme etc. etc. — but because of this every single remix just feels like an overly watered down version of the original. I can’t think of a single standout track from Return that felt like it had its own identity, and while it does the job of filling dead air and providing an appropriately Monkey Island atmosphere I think this is one area where referencing the past was very much the wrong thing to do.

That aside, though, up until the last ten minutes Return was a game that felt astonishingly free from shortcomings. Nearly every single part of it felt well-thought-out; it looked good, felt good to play, had a decent sense of humour, and the puzzle design had me scratching my head without feeling like it was wasting my time. It helps that it’s been delivered with production values significantly over and above what most of the other developers in the modern adventure game space can deliver; it doesn’t match the comparative highs of LucasArts in their prime, but it blows any recent competition out of the water. (This can’t have been a cheap game to make and, given the economic pressures that eventually did for LucasArts adventure games, I’ll be interested to see if it recoups its budget.) Most importantly of all, it felt like a dramatic return to form for Ron Gilbert; in spite of the opening, the bulk of Return feels like it was made by the guy who came up with Secret rather than the man responsible for the worst parts of Monkey Island 2.

Which made the ending rather more of a punch in the gut than it should have been. I really should have seen it coming, and I think I’d be significantly more okay with it if I had been in any way expecting it, but I’m ashamed to say that, with Return, Ron Gilbert managed to bamboozle me twice.  He fooled me into thinking this was going to be a self-indulgent repeat of his worst excesses, and then he double-fooled me into thinking that actually he’d learned how to moderate himself since Thimbleweed Park – or at least that he had the equivalent of an editor smacking his hand every time he tried to type the words “THEME PARK” into a keyboard. But it turned out there was a third layer to it, and that the entirety of Return is intended to lull the player into a false sense of security so that when the standard Ron Gilbert-brand Bullshit Ending turns up it’s as obnoxiously annoying as it possibly can be. The previous eight hours had been some of the best adventure gaming I’d done in years so, while I’ve had a few days to come to terms with it and am less incandescently angry about it than I was immediately after finishing the game, I still think it’s absolutely tragic that he was allowed to end it this way. I guarantee it’s going to be the most divisive thing about Return, something that will be argued over for years afterwards just like Monkey Island 2’s ending, and I’m really worried that it’ll eclipse the excellent work that had been done up until that point.

For me, I think it does materially diminish the rest of the game — but not by that much; we’re talking about the difference between Return being a top 3 game or a top 5 game this year. It helps that I fall squarely into the target market for it, and it also helps that I played through Secret of Monkey Island relatively recently; if neither of those things were true, then I think I would have enjoyed Return to Monkey Island significantly less than I did. Fortunately they both are, so I had a great time with it. I think I’d put it in third place behind Secret and Curse, but it’s a close third place. That’s not something I ever expected to say when I bought it; Return to Monkey Island handily demonstrates that it’s very possible to make something that can stand alongside the old classics, and sets the standard for modern adventure game developers to follow, just like a Monkey Island game should. Return is a worthy successor to the name, and a great game.

The post Thoughts: Return to Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I promise this is the last FPS I’ll review on this blog for at least a month.

Even though it’s only the second game I’ve played to do it, Shadow Warrior is still proof that including Stan Bush’s The Touch as what you think is a knowing wink to the ‘80s generation (i.e. your target audience) is already a cliché.

Thankfully this reboot of the “classic” 1997 shooter knows its business – mostly, anyway – and so the only time you hear The Touch is during a short segment in Shadow Warrior’s opening cutscene to establish both the character of its protagonist, Lo Wang, and the tone of the game as a whole. Shadow Warrior isn’t so much a throwback to 90s shooters as it is an attempt to imagine what the genre might have been like if Halo and Call of Duty had never happened; while its link to the past is never less than obvious it also manages to avoid the pitfall of being fully retro for the sake of it, and instead includes a whole host of original features and modern quality-of-life improvements that ensure it stands on its own two feet. And what is more, it does so remarkably well. Shadow Warrior goes down the same fun-over-realism road that Bulletstorm tried to travel several years ago, except this time it actually gets to the end rather than only partially committing to the concept and careening off that road halfway. Said road isn’t without its bumps and potholes, and Shadow Warrior isn’t immune to falling foul of them, but what’s here is very fun indeed.

You are Lo Wang, corporate assassin for hire. You drive a fast car. You’re a master of the katana. You have a mansion with a secret underground lair. You are, in fact, a massive walking cliché (part of the reason The Touch is so ironically appropriate), but that’s only on the surface; very soon after the game starts Lo Wang is bonded with a demon called Hoji who mercilessly skewers Lo Wang at every single opportunity with his ongoing sardonic commentary. This is how Shadow Warrior signals its knowingly humourous brand of ultraviolence; in terms of tone it’s just as crude and shallow as its predecessor, but thanks to Hoji it can at least be self-consciously crude and shallow and take the piss out of itself. Not that Hoji gets to have all the fun, since Lo Wang gives as good as he gets and their constant mutual needling put me in mind of a buddy cop movie at times – at least, if there were a buddy cop movie about a demon invasion from another dimension.

Shadow Warrior’s plot is as thin as the walls of the various pagodas dotting the opening levels of the game. Lo Wang is sent to retrieve a magical katana for his corporate paymaster, Zilla, but all hell literally breaks loose during the attempt and understandably throws a bit of wrench into Lo Wang’s day, and so he spends the entire length of the game trying to assemble the various pieces of this macguffin katana and halt the demonic incursion. In other words: there are demons, and it’s Lo Wang’s job to kill them, which is exactly as complicated as the plot of a game like Shadow Warrior needs to be. Oh, it tries to go a bit further with animated cutscenes and a “tragic” backstory but these end up being somewhat at odds with the rest of the game, so it’s a good thing it can get away with the plot falling flat on its face due to the nature of what that gameplay is.

As previously mentioned, said gameplay involves killing demons. A lot of demons. There’s two or three occasions past the start of the game where you fight human enemies, but they’re pretty much thrown in just to contrast Shadow Warrior with more mainstream shooters because they’re rather dull to fight; the meat of the game is chopping up a variety of demons with your katana, and as far as mechanics and design go I think Shadow Warrior is one of the most polished examples of the genre I’ve seen. Lo Wang gets his sword along with seven or eight guns, and all of them remain useful in different situations throughout the game¹. Meanwhile there’s a dozen-odd types of demon ranging from basic run-up-and-slash-at-you cannon fodder to miniboss material, and all of them remain moderately threatening throughout the game thanks to an enrage mechanic where surviving demons will power up as you carve your way through their buddies. Picking the right gun for the right enemy at the right range is key to surviving some of Shadow Warrior’s more frenetic battles, and so it’s already somewhat more cerebral than the average two-gun FPS despite its seemingly shallow appearance. But as well executed as Shadow Warrior’s gunplay is it is put in the shade by its implementation of melee combat, which is the best I’ve played since Dark Messiah.

What gets me about it is that it’s so simple. Lo Wang gets light and heavy attacks with his katana – activated by the left and right mouse buttons respectively – but these are only used when you’re trying to herd a group of enemies into the right position so that you can use one of your special katana moves. There are three of these: a powerful forward thrust (charged by tapping forward twice), a spinning attack that hits all enemies in a circle around you (charged by tapping either left or right twice) and a ranged slash of energy (charged by tapping back twice). By binding each move to a direction like this Shadow Warrior makes it incredibly easy for even a club-fingered clod like myself to pull them off, and so melee combat in Shadow Warrior becomes almost entirely a matter of positioning enemies so that they can be disposed of efficiently with one of these three moves. Everything else about is automatically triggered through context and is designed to make the player feel like a complete badass. For example, if an enemy is at low health and you swing the sword at the upper half of their body, Lo Wang will automatically angle the cut so that it decapitates them. If you’re holding a gun and you switch away to your sword while there’s an enemy nearby he’ll do a slash as he draws it from its sheath – which can also behead them as per the above rule. Is it realistic? Not in the least, but it’s easy to grasp, satisfying to do and looks absolutely fantastic. The best compliment I can pay Shadow Warrior’s melee combat is that I used the katana as my default weapon right up until the end of the game. Few games manage to pull that off.

Lo Wang isn’t restricted to guns and swords, either. Every so often he finds a chi crystal which can be used to upgrade what amount to magic powers, activated through the same directional cues as the melee combat. These are somewhat more conventional, ranging from a Mass Effect-style levitate-the-baddies-in-the-air ability to a channelled healing spell that lets Shadow Warrior get away with the best of old and modern shooters; there is a health bar and it doesn’t refill on its own, but by channelling the healing spell you can always fill it up to a set point. You can also upgrade yourself so that slicing up demons with your sword heals you, which is yet another reason to engage in the melee combat. Enemy variety, while not particularly imaginative, does serve to keep you on your toes and stops you from falling into the numbing trance of cover-ironsight-shoot-cover that characterises so many modern shooters. Mechanically Shadow Warrior is a very well thought out attempt to fuse the two worlds – like I said in the opening paragraph, it’s like somebody tried to project what an old-school game would look like today if CoD hadn’t gotten in the way.

Unfortunately Shadow Warrior is let down badly by its level design, which starts off just as promising as the rest of it but which veers wildly off the rails into boringville about a third of the way into the game. At the beginning of the game you’re fighting your way through nighttime pagodas and misty bamboo forests, and these are absolutely fantastic environments – the route you take through each level is pretty linear, but there’s plenty of secrets to be found if you wander a little way off the beaten track so no harm done there. It’s at the start that Shadow Warrior hits its highest notes; at the start that it manages to fit in all the best jokes between Lo Wang and Hoji, its best levels and its funnest battles. However, act two of the game takes the action away from these awesome-looking environments and entombs you inside – of all things – a sodding container ship which is all gloomy metal walls and floors. Not coincidentally this is the point where secrets dry up and the enemy design starts to run out of ideas (an enemy that charges at you and which has a weak spot on its back? I’ve never seen that done in a videogame before), and so despite the sterling mechanical work on display the battles start to become a tad repetitive. Things pick up slightly in act three, but by this point the tone of the game has turned weirdly serious – very much at odds with what had been established at the start, and not at all appreciated – and there was also one indescribably awful level where Lo Wang had to make his way through a large, confusingly laid out room filled with green toxic gas while wearing a vision-restricting gas mask. After I’d killed all the demons it took me fifteen minutes to find the exit, and that’s one element of old-school game design I can do without, thanks very much.

There’s also no getting away from the fact that Shadow Warrior is a game that’s been made on a limited budget, and despite the work of a dev team that’s clearly very talented there’s only so much they can do. There’s a lot of obviously repeated level architecture, for example, and god help you if you ever venture into water because you’re liable to fall through the floor and die. There’s enough of these rough edges that it made me sit up and take notice, but while it was occasionally frustrating to fall foul of a bug or to see the same piece of level geometry for the umpteenth time Shadow Warrior has more than enough goofy charm that I forgave it. It struck me as the videogame equivalent of the Evil Dead films, in that it’s almost the perfect B-game. It’s not as polished as a mainstream shooter, sure, but then that’s precisely what it’s trying not to be. Shadow Warrior is offering you something you can’t get anywhere else: an attempt to drag old-school shooters kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. It doesn’t quite get there, but it comes very close indeed, to the point where – like all the best B-movies – you start to wonder what these people might be able to do if they had an actual budget. That is, just so long as it isn’t the videogame equivalent of Spiderman.

The post Thoughts: Shadow Warrior. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.