It’s not Stan and his hand-talking, or the severed head that can lead you through mazes.
It’s not actually a story from the game itself.
It’s to do with a friend of my wife’s.
Return to Monkey Island review
I think about this a lot.
Things happened in that game that felt unprecedented back in the early 1990s.
The scope of it, the richness of the Caribbean setting, the ease of the comedic tone.
But also the set-pieces.
The fact that the fourth wall was acknowledged and then shattered.
Well, this felt almost illicit.
Maths room, 9am on a Monday: You will notbelievewhat happened in Monkey Island last night.
Monkey Island, incidentally, was an adventure game or point-and-click that lead to a series of adventure games.
Back in the day this was the single most lavish genre around - it was a sumptuous genre.
How many different locations?
How many dialogue choices?
This was the genre that developers poured everything they had into.
Vital genre territory was up for grabs.
Should you be able to die in an adventure game?
Should you have programming puzzles?
How stuck should a player be able to get for it to still count as, like,gameplay?
Monkey Island ruled here.
And there are jokes!
Jokes that hid puzzles within them: what to do with that red herring in your inventory?
Jokes that had clearly been made by real people with their own cultural lives and touchstones.
Monkey Island was phenomenal.
The sequels were good, too, to a point.
Baudrillard would have been moved to an essay or two if he played it.
I almost wet myself.
Now, Monkey Island has returned.Return to Monkey Island!
(Tim Schafer is away sadly, but he’s busy so who can blame him?)
And guess what, it’s a thing of immense charm.
A thing of luxurious, quilted, velveteen nostalgia.
The thing is, though, I could probably argue that this is thematic, even harmonious.
In love with it, in thrall to it, in step with its famous beats and itinerary.
A spell is being worked.
The spirit part is right.
This is almost an attempt to summon the bright ghosts of the past.
I will honestly have a go at spoil nothing but the basics.
He returns to Melee Island, the series' best location.
The lookout is still blind.
He knows what he wants: treasure.
But he doesn’t know how to get it.
And so you set off.
A word on the interface.
It’s fascinating to play the Monkey Island games in sequence and see how adventure game interfaces evolved.
Verb lists with pictorial inventories?
A sort of magical doubloon attached to your cursor?
Return is the kind of simplicity that comes from time and understanding.
Contextual button prompts tell you what you might and can’t do, dialogue can be skipped or repeated.
It’s a game that wants to get out of your way as much as possible.
Memories mingling with the present.
The puzzles are good.
The narrative takes a while to reveal itself.
This is a game born of frustrations with adventure games.
The challenge remains, but the friction has been taken away.
What a thing it is!)
We’re in a world of textured flatness here, if such a thing is possible.
Take Crowle’s Guybrush himself: stubble; wild hair; a touch, somehow, of Bono.
It’s far weirder than the sitcom warmth of Dominic Armato’s voiceover.
But that’s the point.
In the juxtaposition it creates something interesting.
And it was ever thus, in its way.
It’s generous and it wants old fans to feel comfortable and appreciated - and pleasantly challenged.
Reader: it works.
