We discover the mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood sitting on a park bench, a bit older however not essentially wiser. He’s relaying the story of a quest from The Secret of Monkey Island to a well-known teen. The story that performs out is basically the best hits of his first two adventures, with a sprinkling of parts from Curse, Escape, and Tales. Guybrush is looking out Melee Island for clues concurrently his nemesis, the ghost pirate Le Chuck. He enlists the assistance of acquainted faces, like his lover Elaine and slippery used boat salesman Stan. There’s additionally some welcome and charming new companions, just like the cynical Locke Smith, whose identify is about as on the nostril because the comedy will get right here.
It’s tough to explain simply how satisfying Return is to play for a long-time journey recreation fan. Advanced from director Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park engine, the contextual interplay, dialogue, and puzzling is refined to a degree of feeling model new. Tiresome mechanics like backtracking between acquainted areas and sifting by conversations are gone. Slightly than robotically touring from display to display, it feels such as you’re at all times the place you must be. The puzzles themselves are not absurd workouts in merchandise mixture, right here all the pieces has a floor logic. And because of the richly detailed artwork type, there is not even any pixel searching to talk of.
There’s a touch guide obtainable within the stock from the beginning, which accommodates a number of ranges of clues, that vary from mild nudges to an in depth description of the answer.
To cap off the standard of life enhancements, there are two problem modes: Laborious mode (described as The Full Monkey) is basically simply regular, the place sequence and style aficionados ought to go. Informal mode truncates the puzzle chains, which means {that a} multi-location effort to seek out an merchandise turns into a easy case of choosing it up from the ground.
The dev crew has made additional efforts to make the sport really feel easy with a controller and it actually exhibits. As anybody that performed point-and-click adventures on PS1 can attest, transferring that cursor round is sluggish and irritating. The controls listed below are intuitive and set a regular for adventures that normally really feel extra at dwelling on PC.
In the end, with Return to Monkey Island, unique creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman haven’t solely crafted a loving throwback to a style they helped popularise, they’ve additionally reinvigorated it.
