Return to Monkey Island - A Game by Ron Gilbert - 2022

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Confirmed today, a brand new Monkey Island game is coming, courtesy of Lucasfilm Games, Devolver Digital, and Ron Gilbert's Terrible Toys! Rocking a brand new art-style, the game breaks a decade long absence of the series, with the last game (Tales of Monkey Island) having released all the way back in 2009. This is also pretty important because Ron Gilbert was the original creator of Monkey Island, creating both MI 1 and 2, before leaving Lucasarts, and stating he'd never make another game.

It's been pretty infamous that Ron's always said if he had the chance to make what would be his Monkey Island 3, it would be vastly different to the actual third title in the series - Curse of Monkey Island. With that, it remains to be seen if this will render the rest of the games since MI2 non-canon, or if it will follow up Tales. However, Murray being present (assuming he's in the game and not just the trailer) is promising, given that he was only introduced in Curse.

[Indigo Rush]

Oh heck YES, I LOVE Monkey Island. 

[Plumbers_Helper]

3 hours ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

 With that, it remains to be seen if this will render the rest of the games since MI2 non-canon, or if it will follow up Tales. However, Murray being present (assuming he's in the game and not just the trailer) is promising, given that he was only introduced in Curse.

Ron Gilbert confirmed on twitter that Curse is still canon. It's possible this game could be the fabled "Monkey Island 5" that was always said to have taken place between Escape and Tales. Return to Monkey Island was even the name LucasArts used for the game as part of a April Fools joke back in 2002.

I'm so excited! I always thought Disney owning the franchise meant we'd never see another Monkey Island game again, I'm glad I was wrong.

[Covskin]

I am so ready for this. That brief Sea of Thieves Easter egg was cute and cool to see the series get remembered in 2021 but this is absolutely astonishing. Dave Grossman is back too, as is Michael Land and Dominic Armato! Now I'm wondering if they can convince Earl Boen to come back again.

Kinda sad no Tim Schafer involvement but they've always kept in contact with each other so I wouldn't be surprised if they've bounced a couple of ideas off each other behind closed doors.

Monkey Island 2 is legit one of my top 3 games of all time so I am beyond hyped, and it's out this year! Can't wait.

[Covskin]

New trailer!

I... really do not like this artstyle. It seemed fine in the reveal but this trailer does not make it look appealing. But everything else seems good! The returning characters, music, possible playable Elaine? I hope I can get used to the art.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Just finished the game and...uggh. 

I really enjoyed the game, really enjoyed it. As in it was possibly my favourite game of the year, and then the ending came up, and...well. 

I just need to preface this by saying - I started this series with Tales of Monkey Island, following along with it after playing Sam & Max and Wallace & Gromit. So by the standards of this fanbase, I'm honestly much younger blood compared to those who have played the games when they originally came out and everything else. That said...

Spoiler

...I am just not remotely a fan of this ending being yet another non-ending of the series. I'm someone that waited nearly a decade for some kind of plot follow-up to Tales of Monkey Island (Something we don't even get here because despite the game being in continuity, and even a major puzzle following Guybrush's retelling of Lair of the Leviathan, and Morgan).

Look. I get what the game's plot was trying to go with. That the Secret of Monkey Island was never going to live up to expectations hoisted upon it for over twenty years. That the question arises that maybe Guybrush's constant trail of destruction doesn't justify this goal. But the way the story tries to handle it feels so utterly poorly handled that it's just dreadful. It'd be one thing if the game just never let Guybrush see the secret (despite that being the premise of the game itself), but it's another thing when the game literally DROPS all of it's narrative plot points at the eleventh hour with zero kind of conclusion to them. 

What happens to Guybrush and the arc they're driving with him being obsessed with the secret and the destruction he causes in pursuit of it? Nothing. What happens with Elaine as she's having doubts it's all worth it? Never established. What about LeChuck and the fact the Voodoo Lady starts it all off by literally stating that him getting the secret would be trouble for everyone? Never established. Characters like Captain Maddison, who's one of the game's major antagonists is just forgotten about and never brought up again. It's not good story-telling, it's like you didn't even try to deliver a climax or an ending, so you just said "nah" and wrote a pile of gibbering nonsense to justify it.

And all I can say is I am so sick of the runaround with this series. I'm sick of the 'what if this is fake or that's fake'. I don't care about meta twist endings where the series we followed actually never mattered and was never important, and the game was on a great start with me by giving us a logical reason as to keep the other games into continuity and also explain how MI2's ending ties into it all, which is why it's so more disappointing that they retreaded the entire ending in the end.

This is a series that's gone into three massive hiatuses as is. A series that's left on cliffhangers three different times over. Return was being established as the big finale, the miracle game where they'd give us a great climax to it all and reveal the final overlying mystery. And the fact it didn't even attempt to resolve that mystery, or how the characters respond to it just leaves it feeling utterly empty. The big climax thrown away again for a cliffhanger that they're retreading from the 90s, and is performed even less as effective this time as it was then. 

I don't know what else to say. Maybe it'll be different for other MI fans who don't care much for any games past MI2. Maybe those who've already done this rodeo the other two times between MI2>Curse, and Escape>Tales is willing to be more forgiving, but I don't know man. Making the secret's non-reveal an element of the story is one thing, effectively ending the entire adventure with no resolution is a different thing altogether. 

And while the letter in Guybrush's scrapbook post game does go more in detail about what this meant to Ron, and the dev team, and the story was essentially them attempting to recapture their youth, and the plot is somewhat an allegory for that, that still doesn't change how much of a non-ending it is. There was still ways to have that plot occur within the actual storyline by having Guybrush give the secret to LeChuck, realising it's not worth it, and essentially 'growing up' by choosing to go back with Elaine and help fix the mess he caused around the islands. The story just stops, and that's so incredibly frustrating.