Playing Return to Monkey Island felt like selecting issues up with an old friend. Return is the most recent recreation within the iconic Monkey Island sequence of point-and-click journey video games and the primary in fairly a while. The unique, launched greater than 30 years in the past, is beloved for its foolish story about protagonist Guybrush Threepwood on a quest to turn into a pirate. This new title captures the enjoyment and playfulness that the sequence is recognized for — which is no shock, provided that sequence creator Ron Gilbert is again and Dave Grossman has returned to co-write — and the builders at Terrible Toybox have streamlined the expertise to make it really feel proper at dwelling in 2022.
In my opinion, you don’t want to have performed every other video games within the sequence to have enjoyable with Return to Monkey Island. For newbies or individuals who haven’t performed a Monkey Island recreation shortly, there’s an in-game scrapbook that succinctly summarizes key plot factors from different video games. It’s been a minimum of a decade since I performed by the primary two Monkey Island video games, however the scrapbook had greater than sufficient info for me to get pleasure from Return to Monkey Island’s story. I’m not going to spoil the sport’s plot, however relaxation assured that there are jokes, cameos, and references that I feel longtime followers will admire.
Return to Monkey Island is nonetheless a point-and-click journey recreation, so that you’ll be spending most of your time exploring, investigating objects, and having conversations with the numerous ridiculous characters you’ll run into. My favourite was a bored and bookish ghost that was at all times hanging the other way up. Unlike in older video games, you received’t have to choose prompts like “Open” or “Pick Up” to work together with an object in a sure manner. Instead, whenever you hover over one thing you possibly can examine or use, you’ll be introduced with one or two choices of what you are able to do. You don’t have to use a mouse and keyboard, as there’s additionally a extremely good controller scheme that labored nicely on my Steam Deck. It rapidly turned my most popular manner to play.
The recreation is stuffed with charming dialogue that’s elevated by pleasant voice performing, particularly from returning Threepwood actor Dominic Armato. Clicking by the entire (usually in depth) dialogue choices is often value your whereas; you’re practically at all times rewarded with joke after joke. I notably preferred asking a locksmith about the entire keys in her store. There have been lots of them.
Puzzles are equally rather well performed. Old-school journey video games usually had obtuse puzzles that have been tough to clear up or required a really specific set of steps to full that might have gamers running to discover a walkthrough. In Return to Monkey Island, you’ll nonetheless be doing lots of absurd duties — early on, I spent a very long time doing issues simply so I may make a mop — however I nearly at all times had an idea of the place to go subsequent or who to discuss to.
That’s not to say each puzzle was straightforward. While issues are largely improved, I skilled a couple of puzzles that had unintuitive options that required what I consider as “journey recreation logic” to determine out. An extended sequence close to the tip of the sport had so many alternative threads that I generally felt like that meme of Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But each time I used to be stumped, I turned to the extraordinarily helpful in-game trace ebook, which provides more and more particular clues about what to do subsequent. (I’m all for in-game instruments to assist gamers progress additional.)
Frankly, I cherished Return to Monkey Island, which took about seven hours for me to end. The recreation is simply stuffed with pleasure. Because it was simpler to play than older journey video games, I may give attention to having enjoyable speaking to the characters and exploring the world without worrying about getting caught on an obtuse puzzle. And the story is surprisingly poignant; like catching up with that old friend, I used to be slightly bit unhappy when it was over.
Return to Monkey Island is out there on September nineteenth on the Nintendo Switch, PC, and Mac.