Review of Return to Monkey Island by Doom
A pirate game it was not meant to be
I’m not going to describe my long agromance with Monkey Island 2, how I spent weeks and months playing it as a teen, how it influenced my tastes in games and comedy, how I adored the final which came out of nowhere, and how I wished to see Ron Gilbert’s version of Monkey Island 3 one day. The way he described his “dream sequel” in his article totally clicked with me. Yes, make it like you always wanted to, like those 30 years that have passed since were just a bad dream. Then he actually announced it, and then… denounced everything he said before.
He didn’t want a straight-up sequel to his games as a matter of fact! Guybrush lived through all the other sequels and then more, matured and turned into a maniac obsessed with finding the Secret. Yeah, just like those fans who annoyed Gilbert all those years, how postironic - only I find it rather sad than funny to play the whole game as this sort of postironic Guybrush. In fact I hated him. The naive pirate-wanna-be was turned into a pathetic bastard unable to perform the simplest of tasks without failing or ruining other lives. Intentionally.
Of course, there’s nothing noble about being a pirate, but that was the whole point: Monkey Island has always been its own thing, a hand-made world of pirate-wanna-bees who did their best to look like smelly grog-drinking cutthroats, yet couldn’t harm a fly without properly insulting it first. And it worked really well even in later sequels that respected this original vision. Gilbert decided otherwise.
Return is nasty in its narrative and humour, it disrespects the established lore, it breaks forth walls right from the beginning and leaves you with a sense of emptiness. Besides endless references to previous chapters there’s hardly any plot, and those bits we get steal greatly from Secret and the “worst in the series” as Escape is (undeservingly) known these days. In fact I replayed Escape right after finishing Return and was amazed how much smarter, wittier and “Monkey Island"er it was.
In addition to recycled events and fan service Return also tries to be a poor man’s modern-day TV cartoon. The crudely drawn characters, both old and new, act totally bonkers for no particular reason, they run, scream, make faces, they talk non-stop and crack cheap jokes you forget as soon as you heard them. Guybrush is the worst of the bunch, of course, he looks and acts like a braindead dummy who doesn’t care about anything or anyone, including himself. It’s not the Guybrush who risked his life to rescue Elaine, to kill LeChuck, to save the Caribbeans, no. He just follows some voices in his head as it seems and keeps whining about “the Secret of Monkey Island”. Really sad.
Instead of verb or coin interface we now have a smart cursor that spoils all our actions even before we click on anything. Puzzles are easy even on the “hard mode”, even with a couple of unnecessary mazes, lots of backtracking and some poorly structured tasks like this new shady locksmith business, or the fight for a new queen, or the final test… In fact there was hardly a well-thought puzzle in the whole game. Most of the time we are just running in circles searching for x number of items or performing fetch quests. So much for Ron’s adventure making philosophy.
Of course, I’m probably reading too much into Return, it’s an ok classic adventure on its own, with some fun moments and occasional splashes of intelligence. I particularly enjoyed the minutes spent on board of a ghost ship and in the company of Stan who was arguably the best recurring character. And yet, as a Monkey Island sequel, I found it uninspired, rushed and unwanted, like the team was forced to make it instead of something else. Like milking a cow. Or joining a funk band. Or writing Thimbleweed Park 2. Or the *real* real Monkey Island 3.
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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Easy
