Adventure Gamers - Forums

It was a nice experience. Currently I feel no desire to replay the game. Maybe someday I’ll checkout the writer’s cut.

The eccentric mode, adding some greater and more challenging puzzles would be nice.

I’ve fired up the game a few times, in order to enjoy certain moods. It would be nice, if there would be a varied automatic play, where you can choose a certain position, watch the game being played and takeover whenever you want.

For Gilbert the end makes sense. It can be unpleasant for people who’ve primary enjoyed the pirate world. There exist nice examples of crafted worlds getting teared down. It can feel profane but also fits to the rest of the game. There is a certain lack of seriousness throughout the game. It’s a nice experience with a smooth flow, when you’re playing it for the first time. Afterwards you’re pretty much done. The game kind of used its magic, and there isn’t much left to revisit, explore and solve.

A few days ago I browsed trough an interview with Gilbert. It seemed that he likes Lynch’s films. I like Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive has some fab scenes. Anyway. I wonder, why we almost never get games on this level. Why always the children stuff. Why do they never create grown up, deeper games. Many probably lack the mindset, talent or resources. Only a small fraction of devs, create games, that can compete with the best in other art forms.

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is such an exception. This is video game art. It wouldn’t feel awkward discussing it together with a great film or album. Some devs offer lots of Blabla about art & stuff. They utilize nice art and their games might even be technically well done, but they’re still trivial instead of masterfully thought, meaningful, thought provoking and so less satisfying.

Back to Gilbert. A nice MM Remake, like, fixing stuff, enhancing the experience, adding some new content could be fun, but it shouldn’t take too much time. I’m curious about something new, an adventure, a puzzle driven game or something unexpected, in VR or 2D.

Just played RTMI.  Thought it was a solid offering in the canon.  I liked the graphic design and snappy interface, thought the puzzles and story were on point, and felt overall the scope of the game, length, amount of locations etc, were all very satisfying.  Really liked BrrMuda and the new locations, wish there had been some more of them.

Overall I felt this wasn’t as funny as previous iterations, not sure why, maybe I’m older and mirthless now, or maybe the writers are.  A let down was LeChuck, my favorite character typically, who was so hilarious in previous versions (especially 3, thanks to writing and the amazing Earl Boen-RIP), but he felt sort of secondary in this one somehow, and not bringing the laugh out loud moments.  Nostalgia notwithstanding I was a little annoyed that we were once again back on Melee dealing with the same layout and locations.  At a certain point a lot fo these games start to meld into one memory because of this.  One of the reasons 3 is my favorite—all original locations.  I was disappointed with the ending, not because of the Lynchian genre twist but because it’s basically the same ending as MI2.  Coming out of that alley door once again and everything is just an amusement park.  I would have been happy with another crazy trick ending if it had been an original idea, this just felt phoned in and lazy.  Also having the secret be the same “lousy t-shirt” gag from SOMI.  These twists and gags were awesome the first time, but now it just feels like they ran out of ideas.  Still, there is some odd full circle vibe that I got, coming out of that alley door again, then staring into Guybrush’s eyes on the bench before the credit rolled.  I guess I was thinking of Ron Gilbert in that moment, and it was kind of a wonderful thought, he was reminding me that this whole thing was his creation, this amusement park ending concept, the whole FU of it all, the absurdity, the meta humor of it, bringing that back was kind of cool for reasons more of sentiment than enjoyment. 

But anyway, I do have that post-MI feeling where I really enjoyed it and want to play another one now.  Also just want to say one more word about Earl Boen, I think his VO work in Curse is the single greatest VO performance I’ve ever heard.  Bold statement, but I mean it.  I’ve listened to it countless times of replaying that game and I’m always completely floored.  The first time I played the game I was like, “who the hell is that actor, he’s incredible” and was totally stunned to learn it was Earl.  One of the most committed acting performances I’m aware of.  Just want to say that.  He was truly exceptional. 

PS: I also just wanted to mention that while I thought the music was good, it didn’t wow me the way the score for Curse did.  Michael land’s gorgeous baroque invention from Puerto Pollo will always be the high water mark for me

After a year, I unfortunately have to review my past judgement, which was all too laudatory. And it’s hard to me, because I’m a huge Monkey Island and Ron Gilbert fan.
It took a long time to get rid of a giant cognitive dissonance that kept me away from saying, first of all to myself, that Return to Monkey Island…is just bad. Badly made, badly conceived, badly designed.
First: I really can’t understand why Gilbert dropped the idea we’ve all been waiting for (concluding the trilogy with his own version of the story, “Guybrush Goes to Hell”) to give us this flat and sloppy retelling of the first two chapters.
I also strongly belive that his words (“I made the game I wanted to make without influences…”) are not completely true. Unfortunately I believe that Disney, as in the case of Star Wars, has imposed - consciously or not - certain rules that have greatly influenced the overall quality of the game. And that Ron simply adapted for that.
Otherwise I don’t see the reason for this oversimplification of the UI, which removes a large part of the pleasure of interacting with the environment, for this general lack of depth and feeling of flatness (in Timbelweed Park, a game that I loved, the impression was that of exploring a living, huge, mysterious world…), for this disarming feeling of childness that pervades the whole game.
It is also really disheartening that part IV, where we have glimpsed in flashes of the great game that could have been, is so terse, so badly connected to the previous games from a thematic and narrative point of view (…these five keys where did they come from? What connections do they have, for example, with the Big Whoop treasure?), definitively giving the impression of a game delivered ahead of time, unfinished, incomplete. Of course I’m not just talking about Cogg Island (...after thirty years and all the anticipation of this game, find the time and money to enter this island!), but about many small narrative and stylistic details of which you feel the lack….in short, as soon as the game opens, it immediately retracts itself, making you feel the lack of breath.
Then the puzzles…boys, was there really a need to reduce their complexity like this? ...the hint book, the casual mode, the characters constantly giving clues…they’ve definitely gone too far. Decidedly. And unfortunately I don’t see it as an adaptation to the times and the players (by the way… which players? Who is Monkey Island’s target audience?), but rather a sign of great tiredness of the designers. I repeat, Timbelweed Park was perfect in this department.
I conclude by deliberately not talking about the graphics. It is clear that this game would had found its true reason for existence in that “restoration nostalgia” which was unfortunately abandoned (both from the point of view of history and from a visual point of view) for purely commercial reasons. THAT, would have been a brave choice. Making the game that all old guard fans like us have come to expect, despite the market, despite Disney, despite everything. The game Ron dreamed of. His version of the story.

And instead… we chose the easy way of “adapting to the world”, of simplification to the bitter end, of childish and harmless candor, of grog diluted with fruit juice. The final drama is that I think Gilbert is aware of this. It is as if a certain sadness transpires from what he writes, as if he is slowly realizing that he has renounced “for a fistful of dollars” all that was good and right he had written in his famous post, giving us a bland and unattached story with what has been done in the past.

And so what we are left with is a game that takes the parasitic path of the soft-reboot (another bacterial plague of our time) obviously without having the strength, incisiveness and genius of the original games. Without being able to be neither MI3a nor MI6. Sure, here and there you can glimpse of what this original game could have been, some passages still have the evocative power of the past…some jokes and characters are incisive…but that’s too little. At this point it would have been much better if they had followed the idea of “Guybrush awakens 3000 years in the future”, that at least would have been a really new thing.

What a monumental, gigantic, disproportionate wasted opportunity.

Or ron just made a bad game. I dont think disney cares one way or other about this ip. They are too busy messing up mcu and star wars.