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.

Deep breaths. You can do this. You can do this.

Good god, but it’s difficult. Escape From Monkey Island, while not exactly plumbing the same depths as the truly awful LucasArts adventures like Zak McKraken and Fate of Atlantis, still does not make itself a particularly easy game to like, or to play. I am not entirely sure what was going on with the personnel situation at LucasArts while it was being made, but the feeling I get when playing it is the same one I experienced when playing Mass Effect Andromeda, or the single-player campaign of Halo Infinite, where the teams responsible for the original classics had long since moved on and their replacements were trying to put together a sort of cargo-cult copy without understanding how or why anything in the originals worked.  Escape feels like the most expensive Monkey Island fan game ever made, and while I don’t have the phrase “fan game” down in my lexicon as a pure pejorative, when I apply it to a product made by the professionals at LucasArts, the supposed masters of the adventure game genre, I definitely mean it as one.

It’s not like I didn’t go into it with an open mind. I have played through Escape exactly once, when it first came out in 2000, and while I thought it was incredibly average in comparison to Curse and there were some bits that seemed spectacularly idiotic even to 16-year-old me (like Monkey Kombat), I didn’t hate it. Sure, the discourse turned against it during the subsequent decades and I had my opinion partially poisoned by groupthink that it was actually a disaster of a game, but set against that is… well, I have played some real fucking stinkers as part of this series, and also Chinatown Detective Agency earlier this year, so my scale for what constitutes a truly crap adventure game has been appropriately recalibrated. In spite of its reputation I wasn’t expecting Escape to be that bad, just incredibly underwhelming, and gave it the fairest go I possibly could.

Only to find that, no, it really does just suck.

Story-wise, Escape From Monkey Island is a (sort of) direct sequel to Curse, in so much as that actually matters for a series of comedy pirate-themed adventure games. Having reversed the curse of the diamond ring and defeated the ghost pirate LeChuck for a third time, series protagonist Guybrush Threepwood marries Elaine and spends the next three months on a pirate honeymoon… only to return to Melee Island and discover that he and Elaine have been declared dead, Elaine is being challenged in the gubernatorial elections by a slimy politician called Charles L Charles (hmm, I wonder who this could be?), and that the Carribean generally is being taken over by an unscrupulous Australian business magnate called Ozzie Mandrill, who is driving out all of the pirates and replacing them with tacky pirate-themed tourist traps like Starbuccaneers and Planet Threepwood.

And straight away we have a problem. I like the Monkey Island series because, while it’s ostensibly very stupid and self-referential and not afraid to break the fourth wall at all, it’s usually quite clever about how it does it.  The first game was the best at leveraging this, being full of anachronistic jokes about the extremely theme park-y nature of its world (as well as adventure games in general), but they were always delivered with the narrative equivalent of a knowing wink because the writing assumed the player was smart enough to already be in on said jokes without over-explaining them. You have isolated absurdities like the grog machine and the piranha poodles and the guy in the troll costume who eats the red herring, and there are a lot of them, but they’re isolated; most of the time the game is paying just enough lip service to its pirate theming to maintain kayfabe, because these anachronisms are only funny if they’re actually anachronisms — i.e. genuinely out of place given the context of the surrounding world.

But where Monkey Island’s story and humour was stupid in a clever way, Escape From Monkey Island’s story and humour is just stupid in a stupid way. This is not a pirate-themed adventure game with a lot of modern-day references, this is a modern-themed (or at least 2000s-era modern) adventure game that occasionally remembers that it was supposed to have pirates in it at one point. When nearly everything in the game is something ripped directly from the real world, the anachronisms cease to be remarkable — they’re just normal, at that point. Why is the idea of a Starbuccaneers funny if it’s on an entire island full of chain restaurants and microbreweries and real estate offices? If everything in your game is absurd and ridiculous, then nothing is; it’s just business as usual, which is kind of a problem when this is the only joke that Escape really knows how to do. And if you’re so insecure that you have to explain that joke up front, again and again, then you’re a terrible comedian. This is the exact same mistake the end of Monkey Island 2 made, except applied to an entire game, and it is absolutely awful.

So Escape, by its very nature, is a game that’s laser-targeted to piss me off, with absolutely none of the exceptionally self-assured dry humour of the games it’s supposed to be following up, and which failed to make me laugh even once. This time around, though, there was something that felt awfully familiar about the way it was going about this. Escape features:

• An obsession with Americana and tourism.
• Incredibly US-centric humour that has all of the subtlety and sophistication of a fart machine.
• An Australian villain.

And yet I didn’t manage to connect the dots until a friend explicitly pointed this out: the lead designers on Escape From Monkey Island are the same criminals responsible for Sam & Max. Everything fell into place after that; Escape From Monkey Island has far more in common with Sam & Max – a game that I intensely disliked — than it does the Monkey Island series, to the point where it isn’t so much Monkey Island 4 as it is the Sam & Max sequel that Sean Clark presumably hadn’t been allowed to make.

This goes a long way towards explaining why Escape is the way it is. Perennial series villain LeChuck is stuck playing second fiddle to an incredibly boring pisstake of Rupert Murdoch because the Sam & Max designers think Australia and Australians are inherently funny. Spoiler: they are not, and the uncharitable part of me strongly suspects that the designers and writers of Escape From Monkey Island had never travelled outside of the continental United States, because that’s the only way you could find the mere concept of an Australian accent side-splittingly hilarious. This would also explain why Escape appears to be a game targeted solely at the US market; LucasArts games have always had this problem where a lot of the humour is dependent on having at least a surface-level understanding of US history and culture, but Escape takes it to another level entirely. Even now, twenty-two years later, there are lines in Escape that are clearly structured like jokes, and which are clearly meant to be funny, but which remain largely impenetrable to me because they’re only parsable by people who grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s. The Marco Polo “joke” is the best example of this — I think it’s a game (or hazing ritual) in American schools, but that’s only my best guess based on the context it’s presented to me in, and even with that knowledge I don’t understand why the joke is supposed to be funny.

(Of course I’m overlooking the most obvious explanation here: that the joke simply isn’t very good.)

The really weird thing about Escape being the most insular LucasArts adventure game of them all is that Curse undersold in the US — the entire series historically undersold in the US — and Wikipedia tells me that Escape would not have been made if not for strong sales of Curse in Germany. When the game performs so poorly in the US market, why are you cutting out everyone who lives outside of it — i.e. the people who bought your game in the past, and who you are hoping will show up to buy the sequel — from half of the jokes? And then the other half are just absolutely insipid, lowest common denominator stuff. We have some charming 2000-era joking around disabled people and the use of politically-correct language, Guybrush complains on multiple occasions because he’s been given a pink ship, and the portrayal of Guybrush and Elaine as a married couple is one step away from deploying words like “ball and chain”. This wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows at the time but coming back to it in 2022 is pretty cringeworthy stuff; when the figurehead of Guybrush’s ship comes alive and starts talking to him it’s actually a relief that it’s only used to hit you around the head with a Titanic reference (that I already got thanks to the figurehead’s pose) instead of anything mildly sexist or ableist.

I’d like to say that the Sam & Max connection also explains why Escape is such a startlingly ugly game, but this is something that makes a little less sense than the rest of it. Both Sam & Max and Escape are massively overfond of every single character in the game being a grotesque caricature that is thoroughly unsettling to look at and unpleasant to talk to. In Escape’s case this is at least partly because of the limitations of the 3D models; where Grim Fandango wisely chose to populate its world with a cast of stylised skeletons that didn’t have a huge amount of model detail, Escape has to figure out how to render a convincing pirate using technology that honestly feels pretty primitive even for 2000. Guybrush is the only character drawn in a semi-straightforward style and he might be the worst of the lot; he has none of the expressiveness of his prior incarnations, and so you spend most of the game in the company of an empty-eyed mannequin wearing a constant idiotic smirk. Given how he turned out I can somewhat understand the more extreme cartoonish stylisation of the various NPCs he meets along the way, but the overall choices made are baffling: the game is full of too-long noses, too-wide smiles and proportions straight out of a Hellraiser movie that make me wonder if I’m going to be meeting any of these characters in my nightmares later.

And Escape’s handling of its pre-rendered 2D backdrops gives me a new appreciation for Grim Fandango’s. Sure, they haven’t aged well in places, but there was an artistic vision driving most of Grim Fandango (except for the brown bits) that occasionally transcended the limitations of late 90s CG artwork and which somewhat insulated the rest of it from the passage of time. By contrast Escape’s backdrops are best described as the CG equivalent of drawings in Microsoft Paint, because they have no imagination. Every building is a square box with a sign on it telling you what it is. Every interior is the same collection of brown walls and brown flooring and brown stairs and brown railings and brown furniture. In the rare event that the game chooses to insert some detail into an environment, it’ll self-sabotage by using Comic Sans (or an adjacent font) for its lettering. The only thing that really stands out is the signature Monkey Island cloud artwork, and even this just serves to highlight how crap the rest of it is by its sheer incongruousness. It’s only when you get to Monkey Island itself in the third act of the game that the game steps outside of the Brown paradigm; it’s here that the one mildly impressive environment is to be found, with the stained glass windows in the Church of LeChuck serving as the only real creative outlet for an art team that used to be regarded as the best in the industry. This is not a world that I want to spend any time in, and Escape From Monkey Island as a whole is quite possibly the ugliest LucasArts adventure since Zak McKraken.

So the writing sucks and it’s no fun to look at, but what about the puzzles? Well, the best thing I can say about Escape’s puzzles is that, having played through the entire LucasArts adventure game catalogue now, they’re not quite as bad as they could have been. There is a tenuous thread of logic that runs through most of them, and while that logic is often cartoon logic (these are the same people who made Sam & Max, after all), it wasn’t that often that I was stymied by a complete non-sequitur of a solution. Guybrush still gives verbal hints as to what you’re supposed to do, and while these aren’t as helpful as the ones from Curse they’re usually enough to stop you straying too far in your thinking. There is one extremely notable exception to all this that I’ll get into in just a moment, and there are a few other blips that I could call out if I really wanted to (like the manhole cover and the parrots) but on the whole I think Escape’s puzzles are, while incredibly tedious, also reasonably inoffensive; the real problem with them is that they’re usually trying to be funny in some way, and Escape’s constant failure to actually be funny just ends up being sad, after a while. Because they’re not funny they just come across as the tedious make-work that adventure game puzzles ultimately are; since I didn’t care about the story and they weren’t making me laugh, and also because the GrimE engine has really cut down on the potential for custom animations or interface fuckery, solving them was a comparatively mundane process that carried zero weight or sense of accomplishment. It was just a series of boring, joyless tasks, and then once I’d finished them the game was over.

Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to play Escape themselves can probably guess what the exception is though; two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any Monkey Island series veteran: Monkey Kombat. This is Escape’s take on Insult Swordfighting, a series “tradition” that has at this point been run so far into the ground it can probably start mining for rare earth minerals. Unlike most people I’ve hated Insult Swordfighting ever since it appeared in the first Monkey Island; it’s a puzzle that’s mostly reliant on trial and error as you gather the insults and their responses, but Monkey Kombat goes one step further and makes itself entirely reliant on trial and error. Because this is 2000, and because the writers of Escape are a collection of the least funny people on the face of planet Earth, Monkey Kombat is an entire game system predicated on the idea that the player will laugh and laugh and laugh when they see Escape has included a parody of Mortal Kombat. Guybrush fights a collection of monkeys by assuming one of five stances, and each stance can beat two of the four other stances. But he doesn’t know which stances beat which to start with, and he also doesn’t know which button combinations move from stance to stance, and he has to gather this by repeatedly losing to the monkeys while the player painstakingly generates a list of the 25 possible stance combinations and the button presses required to win each one.  There are no jokes in Monkey Kombat besides the name, as the button presses correspond to monkey noises (“Oop! Ack! Chee!”) instead of “witty” repartee, and so all it is is a pure time sink. Escape From Monkey Island clocks in at a whopping six hours long, and a full half an hour of that was Monkey Kombat. It’s the single biggest factor in my rating of Escape dropping from “not as bad as Zak McKraken” to “almost as bad as Zak McKraken”.

(And just in case you’re thinking “Well, if making the list of stances is so boring, why not just look it up on the internet?” LucasArts are way ahead of you, since Monkey Kombat is one of several puzzles in Escape where the solution is randomised per playthrough to ensure that the player has to endure the sheer tedium of it.)

As tedious as the puzzles are, though, they’d be even worse if not for the improvements made to the GrimE engine. If I had had to play Escape with Grim Fandango controls I would not have made it to the end; it’s the longest LucasArts adventure game of them all, and having to deal with that crap for six hours is completely out of the question, especially when I’m playing the original release and not a fancy remaster with point-and-click controls that could be optionally invoked to sand off some of the rough edges, as I was with Grim Fandango. Fortunately while LucasArts may have forgotten how to write or structure an adventure game, with Escape they did belatedly remember some of the quality-of-life lessons they’d learned after making 11 games in the SCUMM engine:

• The biggest one is listing all objects in proximity to Guybrush at the bottom of the screen and letting you page through them with Page Up/Down to select the one you want him to interact with, which probably shaved around an hour off the game’s running time because I wasn’t wasting any of it accidentally interacting with the wrong item as I did in Grim Fandango, repeatedly.
• The inventory is still something that you scroll through one item at a time, but in Escape you can at least see the entire inventory while you’re scrolling and quickly get to the item you want.
• There are once again dedicated keyboard buttons to Use and Pick Up objects instead of having to rely on the blunt instrument of Interact for the entire game, and — a godsend — an additional Outside command that immediately teleports you either outside the building you’re currently in, or out of the settlement to the world map

These improvements are still nowhere near providing the precision and convenience of the final tranche of SCUMM games, but they are appreciated nevertheless, and if Grim Fandango had had these extra features I think I would have liked it a lot more.

Otherwise I think the only part of Escape that really pulls its weight is the music. This is not outstanding by LucasArts standards — it’s severely handicapped by the best tracks having obnoxious background ambience baked into the sound files — but it sounds like Monkey Island and makes for a perfectly pleasant listen. I was even surprised to find that I remembered some of it, like the Lucre island theme; it had been buried in my brain for over two decades, but as soon as I heard the first few bars the rest of it came flooding back. There aren’t that many standout tracks, but what’s here is good nevertheless and I think I was just surprised to find something to like about Escape since the soundtrack is so much better than the game it’s unfortunately stuck in.

(Oh, and while we’re on the subject of sound stuff: Dominic Armato returns as Guybrush but there’s a weird desperation to his voice acting performance in this game, like he’s a struggling improv comedian who really wants people to laugh at his jokes. This is at least in keeping with the tone of the rest of the game, and I can’t exactly say I blame him since I don’t think there’s anyone out there that could make this material work.)

About the best thing that I can say about Escape From Monkey Island is that it’s not quite the worst LucasArts adventure game ever made. As unfunny as it is, as ugly as it looks, and as boring as its puzzles might be, I think that if you gave me a choice between playing Escape or playing Fate of Atlantis or Zak McKraken again I would probably still pick Escape. It’s a very close-run thing, though, and a damning indictment of LucasArts that, with all of their experience and talent, the last adventure game they ever made was also one of their worst. My piece on Curse already covered the wider reasons why adventure games were becoming increasingly unprofitable to make in the late 90s, but I think Escape is sufficient evidence that even if this were not the case, LucasArts were still starting to lose their grip on the genre thanks to technological changes and employee churn. It’s probably for the best that Escape was their final adventure game. As it is they get to be fondly remembered as the once-mighty titans of the adventure game genre, a studio known for top-notch production values and who were not content to rest on their laurels; one thing I’ve learned from this series is that LucasArts were always trying new things in an attempt to keep things fresh and maintain consumer interest, and while this produced games of wildly varying quality I could almost always find something to like about them. A few more games like Escape, though, and I think their reputation would have gone straight into the toilet the way Bioware’s has today.

—————————

Two years and thirteen games later and I’m finally done with this series. If nothing else it’s been very educational and has filled in some long-standing gaps in my gaming knowledge. I’ve been doing this blog for ten years now and I think this is the first one of these dedicated series I’ve actually managed to finish, and I’m happy to be able to finally draw a line under the LucasArts adventure games — after all, they’ve been dead for nearly as long as this blog has been alive, and surely nobody in their right mind would release a brand new adventure game using LucasArts IP in 2022?

Ah, shit. Here we go again…

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Escape From Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And so, after a rather longer period than I anticipated, we come back to the beginning. This whole series was prompted by my booting up Curse Of Monkey Island back in October of last year, and wondering: why was Curse the last high-profile 2D point and click adventure game that LucasArts made? Was the genre an evolutionary dead-end? Was the lure of 3D graphics — which were exploding in 1997 thanks to the Voodoo accelerator card — too strong to resist? And considering Curse in particular, I wanted to get a bit more context on just why LucasArts had abandoned their previously wildly-successful genre at precisely the moment they’d managed to usher it to its apotheosis — because Curse is absolutely fantastic.

My (admittedly hazy) recollection is that this wasn’t exactly a popular opinion to have at the time. Said popular opinion tended to rank Curse in a distant third place behind the first two Monkey Island games, and one of the things I do definitely remember is a certain amount of griping from the gaming media that the 2D graphics made it look old-fashioned; 1997 was around about the time when everything was making the jump to 3D whether it was a good idea or not, and so Curse sticking to its guns was seen by some as an unforgivably antiquated approach. The big irony is that now, in 2021, if you stick Curse next to any 3D game that was released in 1997, the 3D game will be a mess of jagged edges and pixelated textures while Curse hasn’t aged a single day. It remains absolutely the best-looking adventure game ever made; even the modern adventure game renaissance hasn’t managed to produce anything that matches the colourful, stylised art and animation of Curse. If you’ve played the previous Monkey Island games it is a bit of an adjustment to see the previously regular-sized Guybrush Threepwood transformed into a lanky giant, and the fact that everything is made out of cartoonish curves — I don’t think there’s a single straight line in the game — also takes a bit of getting used to. I thought Curse was a weird looking game back in 1997, but time has proven the value of its art direction.

The technical advances made to allow the SCUMM engine to take advantage of better technology are also impressive. Starting from Last Crusade in 1989 and going all the way through to The Dig in 1997, it’s obvious that all of LucasArts’ adventure games were based on the same engine; they (mostly) all use the same font and the same mouse cursor, and while the later games improved on the art and animation and experimented with the interface it never diverged so much that the game was unrecognisable as a SCUMM game. Even in Full Throttle, which spliced in a whole other game engine from Rebel Assault to do its on-rails motorbike bits, it was easy to see which parts of the game were driven by SCUMM and which were not.

But while Curse doesn’t jettison SCUMM convention entirely, keeping the conversation interface and the coloured subtitle text that indicates who is speaking, it’s otherwise impossible to tell that it’s running on the same base technology as all of the other LucasArts games. It’s the first (and only) LucasArts adventure designed to run at a resolution of 640×480 — this sounds laughable today, but it represents a near-doubling of the number of pixels¹ on the screen, allowing for much richer environments, backgrounds and animation detail. I love the classic pixel art of Loom and Secret of Monkey Island, which did so much with so little to work with, but The Dig pushed that art style about as far as it could go and Curse is a quantum leap forward that would have changed the entire 2D adventure game genre if it hadn’t died about two seconds after it was released. The iMUSE dynamic music system has been beefed up to work with Michael Land’s brilliant CD-quality soundtrack (see the Puerto Pollo theme and the Barbery Coast theme for two of the standout tracks… look, just go and listen to the entire thing, you’ll thank me later) and the truly ridiculous amount of voiced dialogue meant that Curse was also the first LucasArts adventure game to ship on two CDs rather than one. Unlike a lot of prior efforts which threw in pre-rendered videos and voice tracks just because they had the storage space going spare, Curse actually needed all of it.

Speaking of voice acting, this was the first thing that jumped out at me on getting past the introduction and into Curse proper. At this point LucasArts had been fully voicing their games for several years starting with Day of the Tentacle in 1993; the novelty has long worn off, so I wasn’t expecting Curse to make much of an impression on me in that regard. However, I was not prepared for just how much of it there was. Curse has more conversation options — and thus more voice acting — by about a full order of magnitude compared to prior LucasArts games. It’s a dramatic change in approach compared to Full Throttle and The Dig, which went to great lengths to stop you from talking to anyone and whose conversation systems were largely functional gameplay mechanisms with a few jokes scattered around the edges. Curse instead views its conversation interface and voice responses as the primary delivery mechanism for its humour, and so it hits you with joke after joke after joke. There are characters in this game where one conversation option with them advances the storyline and the other four lead to sub-trees of nothing but jokes. And the jokes are actually good! Sure, there’s the occasional line that falls flat on its face, and whether others land depends on how much you enjoy terrible pirate puns, but I think Curse’s hit rate is higher than any other LucasArts game outside of the original Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

(A good example of just how ridiculously in-depth Curse’s voice acting is can be found in the theatre in Puerto Pollo. Guybrush can barge into the theatre while the actors are rehearsing to hear a selection of gloriously awful jokes mashing up classical plays with braindead modern entertainment trends. Most games would record one or two lines for this and then switch to a generic “sod off” response from the actors as they get tired of Guybrush’s constant intrusions. Not Curse, though; Curse has fifteen or twenty of the things that you can cycle through in succession, and then when the game is finally out of jokes it switches to a procedurally-generated set that, while admittedly not very good, is still far more effort than I expected them to put in to a location that other games would treat as an afterthought. Because who is going to see this? Who is going to actually go to the trouble of cycling through all that dialogue for no gameplay benefit? Curse dedicating so much effort to making the player laugh is a development philosophy that’s entirely at odds with modern achievement-driven game design, which is why it’s also a very refreshing thing to experience in 2021.)

The clever writing is also helped along tremendously by Dominic Armato’s performance as Guybrush. In a game so stuffed full of dialogue, where the main character is providing one half of every conversation and is also giving wry, self-aware commentary on everything that he’s doing, it would be easy for Guybrush to seem smug, grating and/or tiresome, a little like Boston Low eventually did in The Dig. It’s largely thanks to Armato that he does not, and there’s also many jokes that rely primarily on his voice acting talents in order to sell them, like El Pollo Diablo or the excellent segue into a William Shatner impression when he’s reading from the ventriloquy guide. The rest of the voice acting in Curse is extremely high-quality — the Barbery Coast pirates are astonishingly good — but even so Armato manages to stand out with a performance that literally defined the character; it’s unsurprising that he went on to spend a large portion of the next fifteen years voicing Guybrush, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it now.

From an actual mechanical perspective, though, it’s interesting that despite LucasArts having voiced their games for nearly half a decade now, Curse is the first one to leverage its voice acting as an informal hint system. If you use the wrong item on the wrong object in any previous LucasArts adventure game, you get a pretty generic response from the protagonist: “That won’t work.” or “I can’t do that.” or in Full Throttle’s case “I’m not putting my lips on that!” This was mostly a historical compromise forced on LucasArts because they didn’t have the resources to write and then voice unique lines for every interaction, although there’s also the factor that this wouldn’t have seemed like the wrong thing to do at the time because it had never been done differently. Thanks to its vastly increased quantity of voice acting lines, though, Curse can afford to be much more specific. For example, early on in the game you pick up a pair of scissors, and a little later on you run across a sawhorse-type thing supporting a barrel of gunpowder. You need to move the gunpowder barrel to another location by rolling it, but it’s held firmly in place by the sawhorse, so the next logical step is to try and saw the sawhorse to bits. At this point in the story the only sharp item you have in your inventory is a small pair of scissors, but thanks to the series’ prior record of Adventure Game Logic (hello, monkey wrench puzzle) it’s possible that these might still do the job. So you try using the scissors on the sawhorse, but instead of that generic “I can’t do that” line, Guybrush instead responds with “I can’t saw the sawhorse with scissors!” Okay, great! That means I must be able to saw it with something, and that I’m on the right track here; I just need to find the right item.

These special hint voice lines aren’t in place for every possible interaction, but they exist for enough of them that the impact of Curse’s at-times utterly obtuse puzzles is softened to the point where they are bearable. Coming to it 24 years later, I think the puzzle design is definitely the weakest link in a game that’s otherwise got stellar production values across the board. That is not to say that they are bad — by the standards of this series alone Curse still ranks in the top fifty percent for puzzle consistency, and if we widen the comparison out to its mid-90s genre contemporaries it’s a shining paragon of internal logic. It does feel a bit too variable, though, with a few too many puzzles where 90% of the steps make perfect sense and then the remaining 10% were designed by an alien or something. Particularly enraging puzzles this time around were using the magic wand on the top hat to get the ventriloquy book — this is especially awful because the top hat is just another prop that’s camouflaged in a backstage room in the theatre that’s absolutely full of props — and catapulting the corpse of the groom through the hole in the wall. This latter one is pretty emblematic of Curse’s bad puzzle design habits; you can see that there’s a boarded-up hole in the wall that you can pry the boards off of, and you can see that the groom’s skeleton is on top of one of those spring-driven beds that folds away into the wall, which is nailed down to the floor. Removing the nails is another obvious interaction (once you have the crowbar, anyway), but what’s not obvious at any point of this process is why you are doing this; the eventual outcome is so cartoonish that there’s no possible way to predict it before you do it.

Fortunately those puzzles are in the minority. While the puzzle design in general might be nowhere near as elegant as the ones in Secret of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, and while I had significantly more trouble with the back half of the game on Blood Island, which I remember far less well than the opening episodes in Puerto Pollo, I only had to resort to a walkthrough twice. And to be completely fair to Curse, while the logical aspects of its puzzle design can be a bit lumpy that’s usually because it is (once again) using them as an excuse for some absolutely cracking jokes, which is a tradeoff that I’m willing to accept as long as it doesn’t completely compromise the game the way it did in Sam & Max. I was very happy to see the return of inventory humour with the python/quicksand puzzle (it last appeared in Day of the Tentacle), and there’s an absolutely brilliant meta-joke where Guybrush drinks what is essentially poison to get interred in the Goodsoup family crypt. He passes out in the hotel bar, and “SOME TIME LATER…” the gravekeeper turns up and comments on how he thought you couldn’t die in LucasArts adventure games. “Perhaps they’re trying something different”, drawls the bartender, and so Guybrush is duly hauled away and dumped inside the crypt; the credits start to roll, complete with a “You scored 0 out of 800 points” riff on Sierra adventure game death screens, and get a surprisingly long way before Guybrush loudly interjects that he isn’t dead. Just like the original Monkey Island, Curse is at its best when it’s taking the piss out of adventure game tropes; it takes a lot of finesse to accomplish this without falling victim to the same bad design it’s supposed to be mocking, but Curse just about manages to successfully thread that needle.

I haven’t really talked about Curse’s plot or story structure yet, and I suppose I should even though I see it as somewhat irrelevant — the story is there largely as a framework to hang the pirate barbershop quartets and lactose-intolerant volcano gods off of rather than existing in its own right as an actual coherent thing. Curse starts a little while after Monkey Island 2’s infamously bad theme park ending, with a bit of hand-waving narration from Guybrush as to how he escaped and ended up adrift in the middle of the Caribbean. He washes up on Plunder Island, where his girlfriend Elaine is conveniently governor but who not-so-conveniently gets transformed into a solid gold statue after Guybrush gives her a cursed diamond ring. The voodoo priestess (another source of great meta-jokes about the series) tells him that the only way to break the curse is to replace the ring with an uncursed one of equal or greater value, and Guybrush quickly discovers that there’s one on Blood Island. So step one of his quest is to find a ship, a crew and a map to Blood Island; step two is to retrieve Elaine (who is stolen by pirates shortly after the game starts); and step three is to sail to Blood Island and find the uncursed diamond ring.

Curse is technically split into six acts, but most of the game’s content is found in just two of them, the Plunder Island and Blood Island segments. It unfortunately makes the mistake of frontloading most of its best content; I understand the value of making a good first impression on the player, but Plunder Island is so much better than Blood Island that it feels like a significant comedown once you leave the former and get to the latter. This isn’t because Blood Island is bad — it’s got a decent number of its own standout moments — but rather that Plunder Island is the bit of Curse that you can put up against any other adventure game in existence, including the original Monkey Island, and it’ll probably come off best. It is absolutely superb, stuffed end to end with memorable characters, excellent jokes and fantastic music, and there’s only one or two duff puzzles in the whole act. Things noticeably and immediately drop in quality the moment you leave, not least because…

…ugh…

…we’re doing Insult Swordfighting again. Act 3 is the insult swordfighting act that has you sailing around the Caribbean fighting other pirates (complete with Pirates!-lite ship vs ship combat) so that you can upgrade both your ship and your insult repertoire to the point where you can take on the big boss who has the map to Blood Island. The insults and responses are rhyme-based now, but otherwise this act is identical to the insult swordfighting segment of Monkey Island 1, which was funny for about seven seconds back in 1990 and then merely incredibly, unbearably tiresome every time I encountered it after that. You can imagine how overjoyed I was to be asked to repeat the process for a full twenty minutes in Curse. (And honestly, it’s a mercy it’s as short as that.) This isn’t even a reference or a callback, it’s just the same joke repeated over and over again like a bad fucking catchphrase, which is something that Curse, for all of its series meta-humour, is otherwise remarkably good at avoiding. I wouldn’t give up the start of Act 3 for the world because it’s one of the best sequences in the game, but I could really do without the rest of it.

The game does pick up again once Guybrush gets to Blood Island, although it can’t match the highs of Plunder Island. Blood Island’s strengths are its astonishingly lovely artwork — just like Melee Island in Monkey Island 1 and Scabb Island in Monkey Island 2 it’s perpetually shrouded in night, which lets the art team do some incredible things with the lighting and colour palette — and a few excellent set-piece jokes. Its weakness is that it’s less goal-oriented than the Plunder Island section of the game, which split its objectives up into a series of manageable tasks and puzzles; Blood Island on the other hand has one objective — get the uncursed diamond ring — but your route towards it isn’t always clear and sometimes becomes so murky you end up going in circles for far longer than you really should. Regardless, it’s a perfectly good chunk of adventure game that only looks bad because it’s sat next to the much better Plunder Island segment. I know this because Curse’s finale comes perilously close to being almost as much of a wet fart as Monkey Island 2’s was, and while it is mercifully short enough that it doesn’t drag the rest of the game down (the puzzles here are so simple that you can be done with it in just ten minutes) it still serves as a timely reminder that things could always be much, much worse.

Still, this unevenness is something of a series tradition by this point; no game should try to emulate the confused, meandering structure of Monkey Island 2, but even Monkey Island 1 had a back half that was noticeably weaker than its front half. Curse falls somewhere in the middle, in that the majority of its content is rock solid but it occasionally feels the need to bamboozle the player with cartoon logic and take inexplicable detours away from the fun adventure game stuff into boring minigames and railroaded gameplay. Its standout features are its art, animation, music, voice acting and writing; that the actual puzzles are a little hit and miss only detracts slightly from how fantastic Curse is as an experience. I don’t think we’ll ever see a 2D adventure game with these production values ever again, because the modern genre is the preserve of small indie studios who don’t have anywhere near the resources required to pull it off. It needed a big budget studio like LucasArts, who had been making these things for ten years and whose development staff was at the top of their game in almost every single respect.

And that also answers the question I had a year ago, when I started this series: why did the 2D adventure game genre die out shortly after it produced what was arguably its finest game? Coming at that problem from 2020 it wasn’t immediately obvious, but now that I see Curse with the perspective granted from playing through the previous decade of LucasArts adventures the answer is pretty clear. Curse of Monkey Island goes above and beyond everything that came before it, but this came at a cost; the original Monkey Island was developed by a core team of around twelve people, but the credits for Curse list over seventy (the art team alone has ballooned from three people to twenty-four) and this is completely ignoring the voice actors and corporate support staff necessary for a company of the size of LucasArts in 1997. Curse did not sell well at all — 300,000 copies doesn’t sound all that bad until you remember that Full Throttle sold over a million  — but even if it had, could it have sold well enough to justify such a large development team? I don’t think so. By the mid-to-late ‘90s game development was becoming increasingly corporate, and one thing corporations are very keen on is favourable return on investment². Unfortunately by 1997 the cost of the development resources required to make an adventure game was starting to outweigh the amount of money made back from sales, and the market only continued to shrink after this — Grim Fandango sold even more poorly than Curse, indicating that perhaps the problem wasn’t with 3D accelerators after all.

So while Curse was far from a dead end in evolutionary terms, in terms of the market and the cold, hard financial truth that lies behind every video game it definitely was. You can’t make a game like Curse and also make money at the same time. Even today, in 2021, you probably still can’t. All of the things that so impressed me about Curse, like the vast quantity of throwaway jokes and voice lines, are also precisely the sort of things that would make anyone in charge of financing a game wince slightly before scrawling “REJECTED” across whatever formal paperwork was attached to their greenlight process. If the big-budget adventure game genre had to die, though, then I’m glad we at least got Curse of Monkey Island out of it before it shuffled off this mortal coil; whether it is the best adventure game ever made is debatable, but it is unarguably the best-looking, the best-sounding and the best-written one out there.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: The Curse Of Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

So I guess I got what I wanted out of this project. Despite having played through The Secret Of Monkey Island six or seven times over the past three decades, and despite already thinking of it as a stone cold classic, experiencing the trials and travails of LucasArts prior to its release gave me a whole new appreciation of why it’s a classic. It’s an adjunct to my Bad Game Theory, where you need to play the occasional bad game to give you the right context for what a good one looks like; here I needed a better appreciation of the games that had come before it to fully understand why Monkey Island was such a groundbreaking tour de force of art, humour and puzzle design.

(Another word on versions. Monkey Island’s original release was the EGA version, which I have been playing for this series. A couple of years later it received a VGA rerelease just like Lucasarts’ other titles. This version is acceptable and is the one I previously played through, although I think the more I do this the more I’m becoming an adventure game purist who thinks they must be enjoyed in the Original Format Only to avoid losing anything in translation; the VGA art for Monkey Island is more detailed but also flatter and less punchy, and I think I like the EGA art better in 90% of cases. Then there’s the 2009 Special Edition, which I regard as nothing short of a complete butcher’s job; modernising the interface and making it fully voiced means it loses a lot of the visual humour and text-based joke timing that defined Monkey Island, while the new art is not particularly attractive and is also locked to the same animation frames as the old art, which only serves to draw attention to how jerky and stilted it is. Its sole redeeming feature is that it includes the VGA version as its obligatory Classic Mode, and that’s the one you should play if you buy it.)

The Secret Of Monkey Island needs little introduction today, but I do chuckle when picturing somebody picking up the box for the first time back in 1990. The box art on its own is a classic, an excellent fusion of the Drew Struzan movie poster style with Steve Purcell’s art, and which promises a pirate-themed adventure with swordfighting, treasure-hunting, romance, undead ghost pirates, eyeball necklaces and gigantic stone monkey heads. It’s even one of the most technically accurate pieces of box art ever produced, since everything that is on the box is in the game in one form or another. It also drastically mis-sells the game’s tone, however, and I can easily imagine this hypothetical first-time purchaser being outraged to discover that this is not a pirate-themed adventure game, but a pirate-themed comedy adventure game, and which has a very definite opinion on which of the three elements is most important (hint: it’s not the pirates or the adventure). All of the previous LucasArts adventure games have tried to be funny but mostly misfired¹ Monkey Island is the first one to go in this heavily on the comedy and genuinely succeed — there’s no deliberate anachronism that Monkey Island won’t insert in the name of a good joke, no fourth wall it won’t break in order to lampoon both itself and the wider adventure game genre — and now that I’ve actually played through the previous attempts I have to say I think this would not have been possible without them. You can’t make a game like Monkey Island until you can make a game like Monkey Island; you need artists and animators who have built up the skills needed to make the visual gags work, you need somebody to look at the conversation system in Last Crusade and think “Hang on, we could do a lot more with this…”, and you need players to be familiar enough with the general concept of point and click adventure games for Monkey Island’s meta humour to land properly. 

Let’s start with what’s become the meat and potatoes of these retrospectives: the art and the interface. Prior to this runthrough I had only played the VGA version of Monkey Island and I thought the EGA version was… not ugly as such, but certainly very basic, and only something you’d put up with if you had an ancient computer that couldn’t do VGA; 256 colours are clearly better than 16 colours, after all. Having seen how the visuals have improved from game to game as Lucasarts have tried new things with each one, though, I have a new appreciation for Monkey Island’s EGA artwork. Steve Purcell and Mark Ebert continue the solid work they turned in for Last Crusade and are joined here by Loom’s Mark Ferrari, and together they push the pixel dithering technique about as far as it can go. For example, here is the first thing you see after starting the game and talking to the lookout:

That is one hell of a statement; this actually beats the VGA version’s rendition of the same scene, which drops the sunset and looks a lot flatter. If you have any appreciation of retro pixel art, Monkey Island is nothing short of incredible. The first half of the game takes place on a perpetually night-shrouded Melee Island, which lets the artists use those blues they liked so much in Loom to great effect; the island is essentially a collection of silhouettes with the edges and detail picked out in blue (to denote starlight) and the occasional flash of yellow and brown when there’s an actual light source present. It’s an effect that I like very much; I did always wonder why Melee used such a curious colour scheme when I was playing the VGA version, but now I completely understand. Interior locations can be a little basic, but the exteriors are all gorgeous, which is not a word I was expecting to use about EGA art when I started this series — Monkey Island has the same resolution and colour palette as Maniac Mansion, but looks a million times better. What’s particularly impressive about Monkey Island, though, is that when the story shifts to the daytime jungle environment of Monkey Island itself — and “daytime jungle” is not something that LucasArts have historically handled well up until this point — the art is still pretty solid. They have to make some odd colour choices, like the giant stone monkey head being picked out in grey, black and…. light blue? It’s never less than acceptable, though, and they manage some excellent background art on Monkey Island in spite of this being their weakest area.

Not only is the artwork just generally great, though, but there’s also an increased level of bespoke one-off animations when Guybrush performs a specific task. These featured in Last Crusade but there were only seven or eight of them compared to the dozens found in Monkey Island: Guybrush digs for treasure, he uses his rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle to cross a chasm, he gets fired from a cannon across a circus tent (from two different angles), he uses a giant cotton ear bud to clean the ear of the giant stone monkey head (don’t ask)… these give him a ton of character compared to the static protagonists of Loom and co., not to mention being a prime source of a lot of the visual jokes in the game. The talking-head close-ups also return whenever you talk to certain characters in the game, and while they’re used rather oddly — I get that Carla and Captain Smirk deserve close-ups, and they’re great ones, but why do these three random pirates in the SCUMM bar get them too? — they serve to add that additional bit of atmosphere to the game.

The interface makes it across from Last Crusade with all of the same basic features, but also with two very important changes. First is that the verbs and the inventory have been rearranged to sit side by side instead of on top of one another; this changes the inventory into a more logical single-column list format and lets them have six inventory items on screen instead of four. It’s a much more efficient layout, and the reason LucasArts can make this change now is that they’ve ditched several of the more redundant verbs from previous games: SWITCH is gone because there’s no character switching in Monkey Island, and there’s no incredibly specific verbs that you only use once or twice like TRAVEL or PUT ON/TAKE OFF. Most importantly, WHAT IS has finally been thrown into the garbage where it belongs; Monkey Island instead inherits the dynamic tooltip-on-mouseover behaviour that Loom pioneered (albeit in an unorthodox form) and which became the standard functionality for all LucasArts adventure games from this point forward.

These two changes make Monkey Island so much nicer to play than any of the previous games since the amount of unnecessary clicking feels much reduced, but Monkey Island has even more to offer on the usability front. LOOK now works as it should, with most things in the game having unique LOOK descriptions which sometimes hint at what Guybrush is supposed to be doing with them, and Monkey Island also has a conversation system that’s actually worthy of the name — in fact it’s the first thing the game shows you after the title screen as pirate-wannabe protagonist Guybrush Threepwood accosts the old lookout on Melee Island for information about the pirates there. Here you get your first short-term goal of talking to the pirate leaders in the SCUMM bar; doing this gives you the Three Pirate Trials to complete, along with a feeling that they’re taking you for a ride, but you also get hints on what you need to do next — you’re explicitly told you need to go and visit a sword trainer before you can beat the Sword Master, the pirate leaders suggest drugging the dogs guarding the Governor’s mansion, and one of the pirates also gives you the idea of sneaking into the kitchen while the cook’s back is turned. Going to the sword trainer without a sword just results in him telling you you need to get a sword first. Okay, where would I get a sword? Does the store in town have one? It does, but I need 100 pieces of eight. Those weird guys I met at the circus promised to pay me much more than that if I let them fire me out of a cannon, but I need something to use as a helmet. Hmmm, perhaps this pot I stole from the kitchen will work?  Relating all of this information to the player via the conversation system gives them a hell of a lot more to work with when trying to solve the game’s many puzzles, most of which would probably be quite obtuse if they weren’t so heavily signposted. This sense of direction is something that was completely lacking from the previous LucasArts games that I’ve played; it’s been eleven years since I last played it and I’d forgotten more of the game than I would like, but Monkey Island is still only the second game in this series that I didn’t need a walkthrough to complete.

And obviously thanks to the conversation system making everyone in Monkey Island an order of magnitude more chatty, it’s also a primary channel of expression for the game’s abundant sense of humour. Monkey Island is inspired by a range of source material that includes pirate theme park rides, and so its world is a tacky, artificial version of pirate havens and jungle islands, where you come away from your hunt for buried treasure with a souvenir T-shirt and the Monkey Island cannibals spend all their time sniping with the undead pirates over who has the access rights to the giant monkey head. It’s absolutely full of absurd anachronisms and throwaway jokes that would be lazy and one-note if they weren’t so well-handled. Take Stan, for example. The idea of a used-boat salesman on its own is enough to elicit a brief chuckle, but it’s also the sort of thing that a lesser game would assume would be enough to stand on its own. However, Stan is such an exquisitely-written parody of a salesman that the joke has legs that take it far past the point where it should have gotten old (i.e. roughly two seconds after meeting Stan), and even so Monkey Island has the good sense not to let it outstay its welcome; Stan shows up to do his salesman routine, sticks around for one medium-sized puzzle (that he helpfully points you towards), makes a brief cameo at the end and then disappears until the next game — and he’s used pretty sparingly there too. Unlike a lot of modern games Monkey Island knows not to overdo its humour, and so while there is a lot of it, it’s always hitting you with a new joke instead of parroting the same tired catchphrases in the sadly misguided belief that repeating the Funny Words is, in and of itself, funny. Some of them don’t land, but that’s okay, because most of them do — and anyway, there’ll be another three along in a minute.

(It’s also smart enough to make its deliberate anachronisms timeless things in and of themselves. Monkey Island doesn’t reference specificities with its anachronisms, but generalities — concepts like tacky tourist traps, theme parks, health fanatics and overly-complicated legalese. The closest it gets to a specific parody of a real-world thing is the Grog machine that’s a clear piss-take of Coca-Cola, which still works because Coca-Cola isn’t going away any time soon. Because it’s not referencing specific elements of pop culture the humour has aged far better than most of its contemporaries, and in fact better than its own sequel.)

What I find most impressive about Monkey Island’s humour, though, is the way it tells some of its jokes by subverting the game’s interface. Take the cannon incident I mentioned earlier: Guybrush is fired out of a cannon, strikes a pole in the middle of the circus tent, and lands upside down on his head. The Fettucini Brothers rush over to check that he’s okay, and the conversation system pops up two possible responses — but they’re written upside down too. That’s a really nice piece of subtle humour that leverages the player knowing what the game’s interface should look like by now, and so Monkey Island can start playing around with it. Your encounter with the winged Terror of Hook Island temporarily replaces your entire set of action verbs with synonyms for “annoy”. The fight with the sheriff in the governor’s mansion takes place almost entirely offscreen and is punctuated by sound effects and the occasional comic book-style POW!, but what’s actually happening in the fight is related to you via the game taking control of your command bar and constructing increasingly absurd commands using unseen items, like USE STAPLE REMOVER ON TREMENDOUS DANGEROUS-LOOKING YAK. I even got to experience Monkey Island’s infamous Stump Joke for the first time here: Guybrush finds an innocuous-looking tree stump in the forest, and examining it with LOOK reveals a whole network of caverns and catacombs underneath it! Attempting to climb through to the catacombs prompts you to insert Disk 22, then Disk 36, then Disk 144, and when you don’t insert any of these Guybrush sadly comments that he won’t be able to access that part of the game². This absurd interface humour is the part of Monkey Island that I like the most, and I think it’s the part that really wouldn’t work without a solid history of LucasArts adventure games to draw on, since you can’t both create something new and subvert it in the same game.

Really, I was very pleasantly surprised at how well Monkey Island holds up today. The one area that hasn’t aged tremendously well is the music; Michael Land’s themes for the game are classics but he doesn’t have the technology (or the disk space) to fully realise them in this original EGA release and so they end up falling foul of the very basic sound technology available on a 1990-era PC. It’s not bad, as such, and does a perfectly good job of keeping the ears occupied while the brain works, but the various tracks do sound like warped versions of much better music. (He fixed this a few years later with the CD rerelease though.)  Also I have a deep personal dislike of the insult swordfighting mechanic, although that’s probably just because it’s the one part of the game that has been absolutely run into the ground over the subsequent decades. Otherwise Monkey Island barely lost a step despite being thirty years old; it’s a perfect coming-together of humour, art, puzzle design and writing, and it strikes an excellent balance between the four that I feel they really struggled to recapture on subsequent attempts. There are other games from the same time period that are talked up as classics but which are all but unplayable today, but The Secret Of Monkey Island wears its classic status better than almost anything else I can think of, and so I think it’s one of those very rare games that actually deserves it.

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