Composers Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian return with another pleasantly Caribbean score, and it goes a long way toward making this feel like a proper return to Monkey Island. The delightful music could easily fool you into thinking you're still in 1991.īut while you’d never confuse Return to Monkey Island with any other game in the series at a glance, the delightful music could easily fool you into thinking you’re still in 1991. It uses a large swath of the color palette, and its over-the-top character design matches Monkey Island’s sense of humor nicely. Return’s art direction is more abstract, but somewhere along the 11 hours it took me to complete the story I grew to love it.
It’s a jarring departure from the games I love, but then again, so was the first post-Gilbert Monkey Island game, the Curse of Monkey Island, which used a Disney-cartoon-like style that I adored. I’ll admit: I didn’t love it when I first saw it. Gilbert could’ve gone the pixel-art route to pluck some extra low-hanging nostalgia fruit, but instead he’s gone with a much bolder modern look. The most obvious way that Return to Monkey Island differs from its predecessors is in its art style. To this end, I loved the not-so-hidden Trivia Cards scattered around many scenes, testing your knowledge of the franchise. But for those like me, for whom the earliest Monkey Island games were a formative part of our gaming youth, this reunion with wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood feels like coming home. And Return wisely offers "Guybrush's Scrapbook" in the main menu, as a fun, visual way to recap the previous Monkey Island games that's narrated by Guybrush. It's a funny, beautiful, polished, and well-paced story packed with plenty of puzzles that are both hilarious and challenging for anybody who appreciates a good adventure game. Return to Monkey Island, which very notably puts series creator Ron Gilbert back in the franchise’s director’s chair for the first time in 30 years, is a similar ride. But if you have made those movie memories with the Peter Parkers of the past, then No Way Home taps into something more: nostalgia, even eliciting genuine emotion at various points.
No, wait, don’t go! Hear me out: most would agree that No Way Home is an excellent, very fun movie – even for a kid who’s never seen the Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films.
Return to Monkey Island is the adventure game equivalent of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
0 kommentar(er)
