Worth: $14.00
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Intro:
... a mostly successful jolt of nostalgia that will likely appeal to series veterans ...
Picture it, if you will: the year is 1991 and a fifteen-year-old boy is just about to finish Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge on his groaning Amiga 500 computer. This boy is an odd duck, with an unfortunate haircut and bad skin, but he seems completely transfixed by the game he’s playing. But then; consternation, confusion, lamentation. The game appears to have ended by implying that pirate hero, Guybrush Threepwood, and his arch enemy, the dread zombie pirate LeChuck, are in fact little kids playing silly games at a theme park. The boy, no stranger to adolescent disappointment, begins turning beetroot red with rage. “What…” he asks in an octave-changing adolescent voice, “…the bloody hell was that?”
Sharp readers will no doubt intuit that the fifteen-year-old in question was your humble word janitor and the experience of finishing the otherwise excellent video game from creator Ron Gilbert was formative in many ways. So dismayed was the hero of this story that he ignored any of the sequels that followed and indeed pretty much forgot about the entire series until the announcement of Return to Monkey Island: the legacy sequel that brings Ron Gilbert – and a new art style – to the series and tries to give it a proper send off, to mostly positive results.
Return to Monkey Island plops players into the well-worn pirate booties of Guybrush Threepwood. Ol’ mate is once again seeking to discover the secret of Monkey Island and naturally, so is his formidable opponent LeChuck. Using a 2D point and click interface, you’ll guide Guybrush through character interactions, puzzles and light exploration in much the same way as you did, say, back in 1991. However, since it’s 2022, these mechanics no longer feel revolutionary and at times come off as downright antiquated. The art style has been updated and honestly, it’s not a change for the better (although that’s obviously a profoundly subjective observation), and some of the charm of the original seems to have been lost in the more colourful but less detailed aesthetic.
On the plus side, the writing remains sharp and the voice acting excellent, and hell, the game even manages to justify the gleefully odd and obtuse ending of LeChuck’s Revenge! That said, it ends on yet another gleefully odd note, so apparently, Ron Gilbert’s gonna Ron Gilbert.
Look, here’s the thing about Return to Monkey Island: if you loved the original games, particularly the first two, you’ll probably enjoy a lot of what’s on offer here. The call-backs, the winking nods and simply returning to a world that made such an impact on young minds is a treat. However, newer players will likely wonder what all the fuss is about and indeed, the ending will probably raise a few eyebrows and not in the way the game necessarily wants.
Return to Monkey Island is a mostly successful jolt of nostalgia that will likely appeal to series veterans and probably no one else, but that’s okay. Sometimes things can be niche and a bit old fashioned. Like penny farthings, rotary phones or the ability to afford a house.
