Was there some sort of mandate in the early 90s that made every adventure game come automatically with some kind of boring grind area? This game is really cool and sometimes pretty funny, but almost everything surrounding the insult swordfighting sucks bad. It’s a problem that you can see later as well, at the point in the game where you have to haggle over a used ship, picking certain dialogue options to drive the price down. Like the insult swordfighting, it’s an interesting idea, but either the design overextended itself or the execution failed at some level and you end up with bare systems jutting out and making the whole experience awkward. (Apparently you can just claim to not want the boat after all and the salesman will get desperate. I didn’t think of this. Adveeeeenture gaaaaames.)
You’d hope that the writing would pick up the slack, especially for a game in a series lauded as one of the comedic classics. Well, I’m going to add my voice to the group of gamers who have gone back, played Secret of Monkey Island, and found it not particularly charming or hilarious. It’s… fine. The jokes are there, but they’re not really working the way they’re supposed to for the most part. And the characters are all really boring.
The story is simple. You play as Guybrush Threepwood, who arrives on Melee Island seeking to become a pirate. And for what it’s worth, the bare-bones nature of the story isn’t really a problem. Guybrush Threepwood is there to become a pirate, and I didn’t find myself really worrying about why he wanted to be a pirate. That might be because I didn’t care at all about the character. Regardless, in the course of completing the three challenges necessary to become a pirate, Guybrush falls deeply in love with Governor Marley, a local politician. When she is kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck, the mission becomes to go rescue her from LeChuck’s underground cave on Monkey Island.
The structure of the game is classic adventure game. Each of the three challenges is a puzzle. Collect items, walk back and forth trying different things, get frustrated, look up the solution, feel stupid and/or incredulous. Wait, isn’t that how everybody plays these things? The puzzles don’t really feel integrated with the plot. In many cases, it feels like the puzzles were designed separately from the story. It’s clear, at the very least, that one-off jokes and silly puzzles were the focus during this game’s development.
There are highlights. The passive-aggressive memos on the titular island, between a stranded sailor, a group of cannibals, and the ghost pirate LeChuck, are frequently hilarious. The ghost pirate LeChuck is himself really funny. And the art is quite good. But call it a symptom of modern gaming leaving its mark on me: I just can’t deal with a whole bunch of filler in a video game, and a lot of the walking back and forth between different areas feels like filler. I ended up consulting a walkthrough for huge chunks of the game. It was cool to see how the puzzles were constructed, but without significant guidance I would have given up just because of how much time you have to put in with very little reward if you don’t get the puzzles fairly quickly. Two stars for the early game itself, three stars because I really liked how it looked and the music was catchy and the game actually gets way funnier later on, making me hope the sequel will be at that level of quality throughout.