It’s been 13 years since the last release in the Monkey Island series of point-and-click adventure games, and fans have been eager for a sequel. Return to Monkey Island is canonically the sixth game in the series and the team at Terrible Toybox is headed up by the original creator Ron Gilbert. Dave Grossman returns as co-writer to reveal the secret of Monkey Island, which was never solved in all of the previous five titles.
The writers aren’t the only ones returning. Protagonist Guybrush Threepwood is back with his adventurer wife Elaine, and the ever-angry, ghostly antagonist LeChuck. The old puzzles are back, as are the witty dialogue sequences, and insult sword fighting, which is exactly what it sounds like—a verbal battle of the wits. Not everything is the same, however. The team has clearly put effort into updating the series for the 21st century, which makes sense when you consider that the original is more than thirty years old.
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Return to Monkey Island has a whole new charming art style, something the series has not been afraid to tweak in the past. It maintains the feel of Monkey Island while taking it away from retro pixel art that hasn’t aged particularly well. Not to say the original style was bad, but in a point-and-click game where you scan each scene for clues, clarity of objects is necessary. This clearer art style is much appreciated.
Despite this one technical change, others have stayed the same. The original composers are back with a soundtrack that is both new and strangely nostalgic. The voice actors for Guybrush, Elaine, and Murray the talking skull have returned, and while the voice of LeChuck, Earl Boen, has since retired, Jess Harnell makes a more than adequate replacement.
Some attempt has been made to update the puzzles. While the original is known for some obtuse solutions to puzzles, this was done in part because games needed to extend their length beyond what the constraints of the old systems’ memory could offer. There are now two modes: casual, for those who mostly want to enjoy the story, and hard mode, for those who enjoy the obtuse puzzles of the original. There is also a hint book on both difficulties that will let you know the next steps to take if you are lost.
The issue here is that casual difficulty begins to feel like a chore to get to the next part of the story. Guybrush writes everything down on his to-do list, making playing it feel like it’s your day off, your fridge is empty, and your laundry is overflowing. I understand the desire to make the puzzles simpler in a genre that has fallen out of mainstream popularity, but with the hint book, it feels like the main hook of the game has been removed for the sake of brevity.
However, Return to Monkey Island isn’t brief. Aside from the puzzles, what made the series so popular in the first place was its story. It’s set in a tropical paradise packed with quirky, unexpected humor and swashbuckling pirates. It’s always been a series that messes with player expectation, which you can see most clearly in how it flipped the damsel in distress trope in the original games—she was just biding her time, Guybrush. What a white knight.
This sixth installment fails to do too much of this. There are still the fourth-wall-breaking jokes, which are much appreciated, but the writing lacks the sharpness of the old games. It seems like the developers knew this. Not only is there a skip dialogue button in the game, but you are forced to acknowledge its existence in the tutorial.
In a point-and-click adventure, you always expect bucket loads of backtracking, but you hope that you don’t spend too much time trapped in old dialogue loops. Return to Monkey Island doesn’t clearly mark what is old and new dialogue, which means you have to just keep chatting to everyone and hearing the same lines over and over. It doesn’t respect your time. The loss of Tim Schafer feels like the loss of the heart of the series. Monkey Island without his unique writing style is just another competent point-and-click.
That’s not to say this game doesn’t have its place. Gilbert has always excelled in the tightness of the game structure, and that is still here. There is also plenty of nostalgia bait for fans to enjoy, with many callbacks to old entries in the series. However, pointing to the old games and getting us to remember how funny some of those scenes were is not comedy in itself. Return to Monkey Island really needed something new and unique in order to stand out on its own.
Despite all of this, it is still a good point-and-click adventure game. You would expect no less from some of the best developers of the genre. If it didn’t have the name Monkey Island, I am sure that it would be unanimously praised. However, it does have Monkey Island plastered all over it. We return to Monkey Island, but we do not return to the place we once knew. It has changed, aged, and yet stubbornly refused to carve its own niche. Expect the, erm, expected.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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