Return to Monkey Island (abbreviated RtMI) is... well, I'm sorry I have to say this, but it's Ron Gilbert's attempt to Make Monkey Island Great Again -- of course, after his previous attempt to Make Point and Click Great Again.
I previously mentioned RtMI about a year ago, amusingly enough, in the context of a similar game made by a bunch of virtually unknown folks. This time around I reinstalled it and I played it to its end, and I maintain my verdict: it's not great in most respects. The story is entirely haphazard, and to Ron Gilbert's defense, it always was. He admitted it circa 2020 and he left this note in the game's so-called scrapbook:
Monkey Island has historically been a reflection of the lives of the people who made the games. The Secret of Monkey Island was about a young person setting out to pursue an exciting new career. As designers in our twenties, that is what we all were.
[...]
We are well into our fifties now. We've had lengthy careers, we've made a lot of games. But Monkey Island still defines us to a certain degree, or, at least, in the minds of many we are Those Guys Who Made That Game A Long Time Ago. And it feels like there's some unfinished business there. When the opportunity arose to come back to Monkey Island, we were pretty much on the same page as to what we wanted to do.
Some unfinished business, i.e. an opportunity to milk a well-known franchise for what it's still worth. I mean, isn't that what everybody does these days?! But anyways, he concludes:
Guybrush, like us, is older now, and he's had a long and reasonably successful career. But he is mostly associated with something that happened a long time ago, and that feels unfinished to him. The game is a goofy pirate adventure, the same as always, but also it's a story about trying to recapture the past, with all its alleged youthful strength and glory. Guybrush will both succeed and fail at this. He will sort of get what he wants, but it won't be what he expected.
I predict the same for us.
And boy, was it completely beyond expectations, only not in a good sense. Apparently his customers didn't much like the game -- I'll admit I'm not up to date with the latest internet gaming dramas, but I did skim the author's own blog, only to find, among others, this:
When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn’t feel right. We didn’t want to make a retro game. You can’t read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a "throwback game". I didn’t want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it’s interesting, fun, and exciting. It’s what the Monkey Island games have always done.
[...]
Return to Monkey Island may not be the art style you wanted or were expecting but it’s the art style I wanted.
When I started this game my biggest fear was Disney wouldn’t let me make the game I wanted to make but they have been wonderful to work with.
It’s ironic that the people who don’t want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans. And that is what makes me sad about all the comments.
What's ironic to me is that the art style and the music are two of the few things that I've enjoyed about the game. The music in particular is identical to the originals, if not in notes, then in mood and down to the instrumental approach. The only other thing that I can appreciate about RtMI is the humour, which, granted, seems over the top sometimes, but that's the whole charm of Monkey Island games after all.
Other than that, there's nothing that pulls it above the average. At its core it is precisely a "throwback game", in the sense that everything is more or less rehashed. There's absolutely no puzzle making me go "a-ha", thank the deities for the integrated walkthrough; no red herring to give to the troll guarding the bridge, no rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, nothing like that. And, infuriatingly enough, all this despite the fact that it manages to recapture most of the form of the first game.
That said, I can appreciate the level of work put into each and every detail, as the whole thing can get quite intricate at times. But that's as far as my appreciation can go.
So leaving aside the meta-referential ironies, which are indeed funny and make RtMI quite enjoyable -- leaving aside all that, and in general, let's face it, there ain't never gonna be a second Secret of Monkey Island; we just won't be able to see another Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango; these are beautiful byproducts of an age now long gone, or at least so it seems. I really hope I'm wrong, but I don't think that these old geezers have anything left to say when it comes to gaming. Time to let the younger generation fill in the gap.
By the way, I haven't tried Terrible Toybox's latest, and judging by my lack of an inclination to open Steam, I very likely won't get to in the near future. Write in the comment box below if you have.
