Return to Monkey Island

3.5 out of 5. When you finish Return to Monkey Island you will find something that I won't spoil from the developers which, I think, sets out what they were trying to do. And it's quite touching and quite mature. HOWEVER, I don't think the game quite succeeds the way it should have as an adventure game. It's good, and I'd recommend it for fans of the original two games. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to a wider audience. Because for a good third of the game (and it's a long third if you play in hard mode with the verbose option on), essentially everything happening is revisiting old haunts that have moved with the times and, to be quite frank, I found it rather annoying. The two original Ron Gilbert-era Monkey Island games stood out because they were wildly original and wildly inventive *between themselves*. Monkey Island 2 *didn't* devote itself to retreading the same ground as Monkey Island 1. It took us on whole new adventures to whole new places with new people. That's what made it fun. Sure, some of the characters came along for the ride. But they were transplanted into something different. Return to Monkey Island only begins to get there pretty far into the game. And, suddenly, it lifts off and you find the same sparkling wit and originality that characterised the originals (especially on the ghost pirate ship and when, later, you AT LAST find yourself able to sail around the sea map yourself and exploring wonderful NEW environments). The game really needed to be that from the beginning (and one of the reasons I avoided the sequels from 3 onwards was that they were too stuck in that nostalgia rut). Beyond that, Return has an unusual art style which I mostly prefer to the art style adopted from 3 onwards, because part of the charm of the original two was that pixels allowed you to do fun things in ways higher res painterly styles do not and left something to the player's imagination. Return has a blocky approach to character design which is quite appealing. *Except*, weirdly, for the design of Guybrush Threepwood, which is just ugly and weird (except when he's disguised as someone else). The makers also make a slightly strange choice to show locations closer up than in the early entries, which felt oddly claustrophobic and missed a lot of opportunities to show some genuinely pretty scenic environments in all their glory. The music is fine, but oddly muted at times compared to some previous entries. The voice acting is good throughout (although recorded with so little use of effects that it feels a bit flat / neutral, in recording terms, making proceedings feel a little too small, though I may have been noticing this on account of the game's making only limited use of ambient sounds). The puzzles, on the whole, are good, though don't expect quite the same level of wild insanity as the monkey wrench of yore. There are also a few too many puzzles that rely on you noticing that the user interface has come back in the middle of a dialogue sequence, which is just an irritating gimmick that is easily missed. A useful in-game hint function that doesn't spoil everything is well-implemented, however. And the ending is... Well, even for what it is trying to illustrate, the ending is not well-executed and in storytelling terms utterly deflating. I was pretty astonished that no post-credits scene was included to make clear that, no, the developers were only yanking your chain and the resolution wasn't really that limp (a short post-credits scenelet that varies with your choices does nothing to undo the damage). And, to state the obvious, the entire opening of Return is devoted to sorting out the problems created by a not dissimilar ending mess in Monkey Island 2. Return makes jokes about that ending. And then messes up its own! It's a good game, it's polished, and as I say once it gets going the writing still sparkles, the humour, the inventiveness are definitely still there. But I think to an extent the makers let their own preoccupations, and the need for nostalgia, override the need to give players a real romp, however noble the intentions. Monkey Island with an ending trying for high art simply doesn't work. Guybrush and co are meant to abstract reality in absurd and ridiculous ways, not inhabit it, and the ending is very much the wrong side of meta for a story set in Guybrush's Caribbean pirate world. Perhaps next time, should there be a next time, a better title might be "Beyond Monkey Island". So they can leave the damned place behind and not just rekindle but allow to blaze the inventiveness and sparkle that so obviously still remain.