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 teenager. The story that performs out is basically the best hits of his first two adventures, with a sprinkling of components from Curse, Escape, and Tales. Guybrush is looking out Melee Island for clues similtaneously 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 troublesome to explain simply how satisfying Return is to play for a long-time journey sport 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. Moderately than robotically touring from display screen to display screen, it feels such as you’re at all times the place it’s essential to be. The puzzles themselves are now not absurd workouts in merchandise mixture, right here every part 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 e book accessible within the stock from the beginning, which comprises a number of ranges of clues, that vary from light nudges to an in depth description of the answer.
To cap off the standard of life enhancements, there are two problem modes: Onerous mode (described as The Full Monkey) is absolutely simply regular, the place collection 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 selecting it up from the ground.
The dev group has made additional efforts to make the sport really feel clean with a controller and it actually exhibits. As anybody that performed point-and-click adventures on PS1 can attest, shifting that cursor round is sluggish and irritating. The controls listed here are intuitive and set a regular for adventures that often 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.
