Review of Return to Monkey Island by shanethewolf

I’ll start by saying that I was very sceptical of this game. After seeing the trailers and getting a good look at the new art style I was absolutely gutted. It looks so rushed and half-hearted, like a webtoon or mobile game. It was enough to put me off playing.

However, having seen all the positive reviews I decided to at least give the game a try. Granted, the visuals were as bad as I expected, lacking depth and atmosphere and when I saw Guybrush for the first time my heart sank. What an abomination!

Returning to Melee Island should have been a misty-eyed nostalgic experience, but the art style left me feeling nothing. Well, maybe a little melancholic seeing yet another fond childhood memory butchered. I guess this is the reason I oppose the art style so much.

Initially I turned off the game and decided not to proceed until my friend suggested I try downscaling the resolution and adding a CRT effect using Reshade. This was a real game changer!! I don’t know why it helped so much but it made everything so much more appealing and made it look more like a classic 90s adventure game and somewhat reminiscent of Day of the Tentacle.

I can now say that I’m very glad I decided to proceed with this game. Graphics aside, everything feels exactly like a classic Monkey Island game. The music, the writing, the puzzles and the humour is everything I hoped it would be. I laughed out loud many times and quite literally spat my drink out at one point.

My biggest regret is that I started playing this game with the mind of a critic, but when I eventually accepted it for what it was and let go of my judgements I became deeply immersed and ended up loving every bit of it.

I expected the puzzles to be dumbed down (as many things are these days) but they too were faithful to the original games, reasonably challenging without being frustrating. At first I resented having a hint book available, but it turned out to be very useful on a couple of occasions and so much better than browsing a walkthrough and risking spoilers.

Though I missed the original interface at first, what they’ve done here works so much better, giving us a full view of the screen and cutting out a load of verb commands that would only impede progress.

It’s always a pleasure to hear the classic MI themes, though a bit disappointing that Michael Land didn’t give us a new score for this game or at least more varied background music. That didn’t affect my enjoyment, however.

Without adding any spoilers, I will say that the game left me feeling unsatisfied and melancholic. Unlike Monkey Island 1 to 3, which I have played many times over, I doubt I will ever come back and play this game again unless they make a remastered version with graphics more in line with Monkey Island 2 (or the MI2 enhanced edition).

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Time Played: 2-5 hours
Difficulty: Just Right