Sam Machkovech
SEATTLE—Long-time game designer Ron Gilbert has repeatedly suggested that a sequel to his beloved Monkey Island series would arrive the way fans want it to: pristine. It’s a major reason why the point-and-click adventure’s pre-release period is devoid of gameplay footage or other major giveaways of what to expect, to avoid ruining any of the puzzles or jokes.
As the long-awaited Return to Monkey Island As the September 19 release date approaches, interested fans will have to surrender to the bones Gilbert and his collaborator Dave Grossman have thrown my way at this weekend’s PAX West. After I entered their conference room and enveloped my camera, the couple turned on an external monitor, picked up a computer mouse, and began guiding hero Guybrush Threepwood around the new game’s environment.
You might be jealous, but I’d say your similar ignorance of what the game looks and sounds like until September 19 is a happier place to be. My patience for the release of this game has now waned.
“Rediscovering that about your former self is really interesting”
Terrible toy box
Editor’s Note: This article ensures that no puzzle, joke, or unannounced character reveal is ruined. A plot-specific reveal, which Gilbert and Grossman were happy to announce, comes at the end of the article.
“Do you want to do ‘Monocle’? Do you want to do ‘Jail’?” Gilbert, sitting next to Grossman, rattles off some vague terms as he scrolls through a debug menu for a near-final macOS build of the game. After deciding where to take me in gameplay, Grossman seems taken aback: “Oh!” he blurts out. “Cut scene happens.” I ask if everything is okay, to which Gilbert replies, “It’s a bit spoiler-like.” The scene in question is not surprising as far as Monkey Island lore goes, but I’ll leave the details aside for now, except to say it made me laugh and it confirmed my faith in the game’s art direction.
The scene, like the rest of the game, features accurately mapped lip sync for the fully voiced dialogue, and the hand-drawn characters are manipulated appropriately to look like detailed paper cutouts drawn in every possible way. Eyes bulge, faces warp, and arms and hands emulate in a way that preserves the sequel’s “picture-book-torn” aesthetic without looking like a dated Adobe Flash animation project. Instead, the conversation sequences I watched fondly recalled some of my favorite 90s children’s books, especially the works of Lane Smith (The smelly cheese man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs) as if they were animated by devoted fans of the source material.
It didn’t hurt that the scene in question embraces the series’ classic sense of humor. This scene plays with the classic archetype of a villain leading to folly, complete with henchmen proposing “safer” business decisions that happen to be illegal and brutal – then campily telegraph to players the exact path they’ll take to ruin someone’s day. . This 90 second exchange immediately put me at ease like a classic Monkey Island fan: as if after all these years I would put on a comfortable, worn-out leg.
When inquiring with Gilbert and Grossman about the sequel’s sense of humor, the duo confirmed that they’d replayed the series’ classic games before starting work on the latest sequel — and Gilbert says a massive game-playing rerun. of his old titles is standard practice before he starts each new game project. As they have previously suggested, the new game takes characters and ideas from the 1997’s Curse of Monkey Island (which neither worked on), while Grossman admits that Starz .’s historical fiction series black sails also influenced the duo: “It’s not written by humorists at all, but there are a lot of interesting ideas.”
In describing his habit of replaying old games before making new ones, Gilbert describes “rediscovering that feeling of, oh, I once thought this, or, this is the way I wrote about this stuff. Rediscovering that about your former self is really interesting, but also, you know, we’re not the same people anymore, so we’re not going to pretend we made this game in 1993. we’re going to use everything we’ve learned as designers, writers, and people and put all that into the new game.” So far, the duo has emphasized “empathy” with how players encounter and solve puzzles, compared to the sometimes brutal difficulty of the original games.
