I finally played Return To Monkey Island across the last few days. I was little hesitant about it because I was burned by Ron Gilbert’s last adventure Thimbleweed Park. It had been really enjoyable, but then absolutely disappeared up its own arse, making a load of not-as-clever-as-it-thought-it-was meta-commentary about the limitations of the game and the quirks of Kickstarter stuff so for instance one of the Kickstarter rewards was getting your name in the town phonebook, which a lot of people did. In the game’s finale, this is called out as one of the things that doesn’t make sense about the world as the game, as the phone book has far more people in it than the population of the game. This is as the world of the game is revealed to be a video game and your player character turns it off. There’s also a thing where the sheriff, the coroner and someone else are all the same person using different vocal tics, which works as a kinda fun weird quirk of a strange town, but then at the end the character that’s seen through the fourth wall points out that it’s a limitation of the game’s budget or somesuch. It was really unsatisfying to spend hours invested in a game and then have it just go “oh none of its real! None of this matters!”
But with my PC upgraded, I thought it was time to return to Monkey Island, a series I adore (except Escape, obviously. I’m not mad). Gilbert wouldn’t burn me twice would he?
I really enjoyed it for the most part. The art style absolutely isn’t what I would have picked, but it is undeniably well made and animated. The voice acting is mostly excellent, with a huge amount of returning actors (the only problem I had is the replacement voice for LeChuck. Weirdly, minor character Gullet sounded more like classic LeChuck than new LeChuck did). There’s some properly funny lines, as you’d hope, and the puzzles were generally pretty good and not too obtuse. I made good, steady progress and was entertained.
But then I finished it tonight and my immediate reaction was “oh fuck off“. Because yes, Ron Gilbert did it again. Does the story have a satisfying conclusion? No because Ron decided that rather than actually craft a proper ending, he’d just do another bit of pseudo-intellectual msaturbation. As Guybrush descends through Monkey Island after LeChuck to open The Secret, he arrives back on Melee Island, but it’s a theme park type place with characters you’ve met previously just cardboard cut-outs and animatronics. Stan appears and gives you the keys to turn off the lights and lock up. You open The Secret and it’s a t-shirt (a callback to a running gag in Monkey 1) and Guybrush goes off with Elaine, like a middle-aged sadsack leaving an escape room/low rent pirate Westworld. It then cuts back to the framing narrative, of Guybrush talking on a bench to his kid, who complains that the ending doesn’t make sense and Guybrush spouts some bollocks about the nature of story telling and the Secret means different things to different people and… just fuck off Ron.
It’s not that I’m expecting some grand reveal of what the Secret Of Monkey Island finally is. I’ve not been on tenterhooks for 30 years to learn that or anything. It’s clearly a macguffin that can never have any satisfying explanation/reveal. But I’m not the one who created a brand new story explicitly about said Secret. I just wanted to play a fun pirate adventure story with some characters I love, but apparently I need to get some condescending bit of homespun “the journey is more important than the destination” bollocks instead of a satisfying conclusion to the narrative I’ve been engaged with. Which I’m not convinced Ron actually knows how to do. It’s like he’s stuck living in the shadow of barely anyone understanding the ending of Monkey Island 2 – which he very obnoxiously taunts people with here by having the opening seemingly pick up from it, only to turn out to be Guybrush’s kid and his friend play-acting the story of Monkey 2 in the future – and keeps leaning into it in the hopes that, I dunno, people will get this one and hail him as a deep thinker or something?
Seriously, going “ah but the true value of a story is not the ending, but what you take away from it” is not big or clever. It’s the cheap way out of actually giving your story a meaningful ending. It’s absolutely worse for video games where you have to be more actively engaged and for longer than you would a movie or possible even a book.
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