After how much I absolutely loved Curse of Monkey Islands, I was actually looking forward to this game. Well I can at least say it was an eye opener for how fast a franchise can fall. Avoid this one, guys.
Story: After the events of Curse of Monkey Island, the impossible has finally happened: Guybrush and Elaine have finally gotten married! After spending their honeymoon at sea (and even then STILL managing to get into trouble with other pirates... some things never change), they are finally returning home. But something isn't right. Where Elaine expected the throngs to be waiting for them, the seaport was empty. Furthermore, some lunatic was launching rocks at the Governor's Mansion of Melee Island... and where she's the governor, that is really kinda personal, don't you think?. When they demanded the man stop, not only does he refuse, but he gives them worst possible news as to why: In their absence, Elaine was declared deceased! This left the couple with three things they needed to do immediately. First Elaine needs to get this declaration of death undone, leaving Guybrush to stop the catapult right now and then get the family lawyers on the case so that they can remove the order to knock the mansion down at all, preventing anyone from continuing to try.
It sounds simple, but things never stay simple with Guybrush Threepwood, and it won't be long before we get hints of two major plots going on. First an Australian man is buying up the island, forcing pirates who wont sell their land to him of their own will to give them up as he kicks their asses in various kinds of insult duels.... and you know his grand scheme can't be good for pirate-kind.
The second reveals itself shortly after you deal with the catapult (which I refuse the explain the details of) in the form of a man named Charles L. Charles. With Elaine declared dead, the island is soon to have an election to replace her for Governor and he is the only one running, so he had offered to knock the mansion down a symbol of how much more in touch he would be with the people then their previous princess once he won unopposed... but with Elaine back he might just have a fight on his hands for the coveted office. Still if she expects to go from presumed dead to claiming her position back Elaine has work to do while Guybrush finishes his own tasks to make the halt of mansion demolition more permanent.
But things never remain that simple for our Mighty Pirate hero, and his quest will soon have him uncovering both a much bigger plot by the Austrailian land developer as well as just what Charles might be up to. Because Elaine said it best: "there is something fishy about that guy." This will, of course balloon into a classic adventure that really only Guybrush could stumble into.
And the writing backing it is pretty good, too. While it may be lighter on the Mighty Pirate's antics this time around, the conversations all have some good quips and will often make you smile at the very least.. sometimes getting a good gut-laugh. The only thing I can complain about really is the last act, which feels more like it was written as much to pad out the game as to wrap things up, but we will get to that when we get to gameplay as well.
8/10
Graphics: Escape from Monkey island looks every bit a point and click title as you would expect based on how the previous games in the series played. However it is the first game in the series to rely on 3D-rendered characters to move around it's world rather then being all sprite work. This was quickly becoming a style when the game was new with varying results (trust me, I've played some real ugly ducks from this era). Fortunately this one faired pretty well. The reason for this is simple: art style.
Effectively this game tries to pull the same Saturday Morning look of it's predecessor but doing so with a world of 3D rendered backgrounds and 3D models. To be fair, it does so pretty effectively, actually, at least in stills. Every character looks pretty good and detailed enough to suggest how they would have been drawn just a year prior for the last game, but the animations, even during basic conversations are going to look very stilted. Seriously this game can look more like old school animatronics then anything actually trying to move naturally, especially during conversations as jerky head motions and very limited facial animations will remind you of nothing more then that.
Still, the world itself fairs a bit better, even if I prefer what came before. It's bright, vibrant and each place you visit carries the feel of it's unique part of the world quite well even as the art style allows them all to fit into one cohesive picture. However, being early 3D renders the detail in each shot can often leave something to be desired. It never feels anything close to real as the game prefers to keep it's stylized look across everything. From the sandy shores to shanty cities and even a few places like the SCUMM bar, everything will look it's part, if lower clearly made of blurier parts then we are used to seeing at this point.
7/10
Sound: And the audio in managed to fair even better, carrying a much more ageless feel. The music score will greet you with the familiar shanty that every fan of this franchise knows (and potentially sticks in their head even when not playing). And it just never stops just sounding great from start to finish. Overall, it's designed to be in the background and never overpower what you are doing, but it's overtures will stick with you long after you're done playing and leave you humming the theme for days. And the sound effects it goes with all sound pretty good too, but a bit more standard for the kind of things you will be doing, with all the appropriate clangs, thunks, and footsteps squishing and clacking through whatever terrain Guybrush is in.
Still, if you are hear to hear this game, you are here for the voice work first and foremost, and it's clear the actors here love their rolls and play them to their fullest. Most of the time, you will be listening to either Guybrush talking with someone or to himself, and these part carry the character we have come to love over the past three games very well. Dominic Armato continues to play his character perfectly. He's energetic, sarcastic, awkward, maybe a little too good natured for the pirate life, and yet he absolutely sells how he sees himself as a legend feared by many despite his real limitations.
Not that his costars are slouches. Everybody here brought their A game, whether the roll they got was leading or a small part most wouldn't notice. You can tell they all cared about what they were making. But I'm also gonna give special props to Murry's voice actor, Danny Delk. If you do not know the series, Murry is an undead skull convinced he is the ultimate source of evil, but really what's he gonna do? He's just a skull. Even so he's always a treat to run into, and you can't help but love the hapless little imp. He is always just an absolute joy and it becomes obvious really quickly why he's a fan favorite, and potentially why he seems to always get along with the Mighty Pirate himself.
So yeah, a lot of this game's sound-work is exactly what you expect, be it a game of the time or of the series, but the voice acting absolutely steals the show.
9/10
Gameplay: And this is where Escape from Monkey Island gets weird, and you will realize it right away when you try to use your mouse: there is no cursor on the screen to move and your mouse does nothing. It doesn't even work in the menus, a pretty standard feature for just about every game designed to run on some version of windows since at least 3.1. Rather, you are about to play a point and click game designed from the ground up to use tank controls for movement and do everything from either a keyboard or a controller with no pointer at all. I can not call this a good move or even one that makes sense... until you realize this was the first time Monkey Island would debut, not just on PC, but on the PS2 as well. And while this doesn't make the change any better, it suddenly makes sense if the studio was trying to make the game playable with a controller instead of the classic mouse that named the genre "point & click." And also suddenly I begin to really understand why PC gamers used to hate consoles with a passion as I can imagine them watching one of their favorite game series bastardized for another platform.
But to get back to the point, you will play this game controlling Guybrush Threepwood as he haplessly wanders around the Caribbean islands trying to complete each of his quests which inevitably lead to the next one and an escalation of the situation he is in. What starts as simply saving the Governor's Mansion on Melee island quickly evolves into a quest to save Pirate Kind within these islands, and it's all done with puzzle solving. To guide Guybrush, you control him with tank-style controls as noted above. He will walk forward when you hit up, backward when you hit down, and turn accordingly with left or right. While wandering around you will see his head swivel when he's facing something interesting to stare at it. While this looks very stiff (and occasionally funny as hell) it's your visual indicator to keep track of the bottom of your screen where anything he might be able to interact with in his current position is listed.
Most of the time the puzzles will boil down to just going to your inventory and having an object in hand to use with one of these options instead of just looking at them or talking about them, and often the solutions are actually a lot easier then in other games in the franchise. However, to compensate for this, the developers decided a lot of these puzzles are more about timing then anything else. This can be annoying since the controls are so off kilter to the genre, but thankfully most of the time it's obvious as you either distract someone so they walk away from you want to toy with or the like, but there are times when the timing becomes less about figuring out what to do so much as a timing game of trial and error to get the real-time mechanics of it just right. The painting puzzle comes to mind as the first real big example of this, but to explain is to ruin the puzzle so if you plan to play you might want to skip the following indented and italicized section.
Guybrush finds himself at the SCUMM bar, previously a pirate hangout, only to find that Ozzie Mandril has turned it into a tourist sushi bar while he was away. He may be disgusted, but the wax-painting map of the world against the far wall brought him here, something the owner wont get rid of. So he's going to have to ruin it, and how does he do so? By ordering the flaming sushi boat and timing when he jams the conveyor belt so that the fire is right under the painting to melt the wax and ruin the picture. This is perfectly fine to do in game, but you get no warning at all if you timed it wrong, and you will because rather then planning for when it will be there, you have to plan for Guybrush to get up pull back and take care of the belt and THEN the boat can stop.
This is hardly the only time you will have a puzzle that will be a royal pain in your ass, not because it is hard, but because the timing involved has to be tried a few times to figure it out... but it is the least complex which makes this all the more annoying when it happens. Still even this would be tolerable if an inarguable step down from what the previous games did. The real showstopper here is in the last hour of the game: Monkey Kombat.
Welcome to what I honestly regard as the shittiest minigame I have ever seen in any point and click game I have ever played and something stuffed into the last hour of the game like they needed to pad it out so the game could just be long enough to justify it's initial price. In essence you are about to play a fighting game parody in which you take turns changing stances (not fighting, just changing stances) in a rock-paper-scissors style game until one of your life bars (made of bananas) runs out. Already on paper it's annoying, but it gets worse as you dig into the mechanics.
You and your opponent will each start in one of 5 stances and take turns changing which one you take. After each change (or choice to stay in the same one) the game will decide which stance hurts which and deal damage accordingly. In the tradition of Monkey Island games (as setup by insult dueling) you have to learn through experience, tracking which stances are strong and weak against the others. This in itself would not be so bad, but the way you switch is absolutely horrific: each and every stance has a series of combinations of monkey sounds that will switch to any of the other stances. Each series is unique to starting in that one stance, and the game will only tell you how to change specifically from one stance to one second one before you begin, requiring you to learn by watching the monkeys you fight with. This is already frustrating as it means in order to really play this mini game you have to get into enough fights to not only track 20 different sound combinations, but also which stances you want to use them to switch to at any given time. You literally need to make a multiple charts to keep track of them, and you CAN'T carry the "research" between runs since the game randomizes this every time.
Then you can add to this getting a wrong combo will just hurt you, and that the monkeys you fight can and and will choose to just not change stances while you are learning and this gets borderline unplayable. Finally once this mini game starts, it doesn't stop... this is also how you fight the "final boss" of the game itself.
So yeah, what starts as an ok game at best completely shits itself in the last round. Real shame there.
4/10
Bugs: Unfortunately, while the game ran great most of the time, I did hit one of the worst crashes I have seen in a long time while playing. Early on in the game, I hit a complete screen freeze while looking over my inventory. And while the game was crashed, it was not letting go of the screen. It was actually so bad I had to log out and back into Windows itself to regain control of my PC from it. Thankfully it never happened again, but it should be noted that it can happen.
Digital Rights Management: Assuming you bought the game in a digital form, there is absolutely zero DRM on this game. All copies will either be ultimately through GOG or Steam. And while GOG is assumed to be DRM free, the Steam version is too! You can run it without the launcher if you wish once you've downloaded it.
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
Score: After absolutely loving Curse of Monkey Island I had high hopes for this one, but it only took 10 minutes with the game to realize it was never gonna reach those heights. And while it was at least an ok game up till that ending, this is a prime example of a game being absolutely ruined by its final act. I would honestly recommend pretending the series ended as a trilogy before Telltale revived it.
System Requirements:
- any 1.8 Ghz CPU
- 1 GB RAM
- Anything that supports DirectX 9.0c and 256 MB of VRAM
- Windows 7/8/10
- 1.1 GB Hard Drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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