🐒🏝️ Return To Monkey Island Review 7/10 "The 90’s. If you’re too young to remember them, they were great." 🐒🏝️ @grumpygamer @terribletoybox #ReturnToMonkeyIsland

The 90’s. If you’re too young to remember them, they were great. Bands were cheap to go and see, you didn’t need to mortgage a kidney to heat your house or feed yourself, and beer was reasonably priced.

But none of that mattered to me back then because we had point-and-click adventures. Which were ace. 

The most famous of the genre was The Secret of Monkey Island. Created by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman in 1990, it spawned a number of sequels. The original team did the first two games and then departed. However, Ron and Dave are back for Return to Monkey Island, continuing the story from where they left off after the second game, whilst still leaving the rest of the games as canon (which is nice of them, isn’t it?). 

Now, if you don’t remember point-and-click games, they had a couple of general premises. One, it’s pretty hard, if not impossible, to die. The focus is on the fun of playing the games, rather than punishment for mistakes. Two, the aforementioned focus on fun, and also comedy.

The scripts are well written, with plenty of jokes. The puzzles are also usually funny, often involving combining odd and incongruous objects to get past a certain point. Mechanics-wise, they do exactly what they say on the tin – you point at things and click on them, and work your way through the story. 

Return to Monkey Island marks the return of us as players, Ron and Dave as designers, and the cast from previous games. Familiarity with the rest of the series does help as otherwise some of the jokes might go over your head (like the mispronunciation of the protagonist’s name), but it’s far from necessary. If you’re new to the franchise, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. 

There are also some changes to the gameplay which, on the surface, are modernisations that should improve things. But unfortunately, I’m not entirely convinced. I spent many hours as a teenager working with my friends to try to solve the puzzles in the old games, and that’s where a lot of the fun came from, for me.

But in the latest incarnation, there’s a hint system for those who don’t want to spend time testing out different approaches. It starts with some fairly vague hints, but if you continue to ask for help, it literally tells you what you have to do.

Whilst you can ask for a basic hint and then get stuck in, having what amounts to a walkthrough in-game makes me feel a bit disappointed. It’s all too easy to just get the game to tell you what to do next instead of scratching your head for a bit and trying to combine everything in your inventory. 

But it isn’t all bad. Another improvement is the map navigation. Instead of having to painstakingly backtrack through every screen to get to a specific location, there’s a game mechanic where you can quickly cover more considerable distances. It isn’t quite fast travel, but it’s close – and definitely an improvement on the old days. 

As you would expect with a sequel to a game that’s over 30 years old, the graphics have had an overhaul. Art is subjective, and some may not like the art direction in this latest instalment, but I think it works well. It certainly feels like a natural extension of the original art. 

As for gameplay, well, I don’t want to give any spoilers out here, so this review won’t mention anything other than Guybrush is back, and so is LeChuck.  If you’ve played a Monkey Island game before, you’ll know what to expect here. If you haven’t, and you’re keen to try a point-and-click adventure that isn’t too taxing, this isn’t a terrible place to start. Although you will definitely enjoy the game a lot more if you have some experience with the series.