I love that game, along with Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle - but this has to be my favorite one.
For some reason I never quite understood, it wasn’t that well received when it came out. My stance on this one hasn’t changed in 27 years and I firmly believe it is the pinnacle of the genre : incredible art, hilarious, crazy but somehow logical puzzles, great music, and above all extraordinarily well written. Very very few games had me laugh in front of my computer. And don’t forget the brilliant voice acting.
I’ve just bought the latest title in the series but haven’t played it yet - I somehow fear it won’t be able to match COMI. I will also be introducing my kids to this incredible work of art - they will never hear about this from their friends at school, and I feel this is typically the kind of thing I can and probably should share as a parent.
I think the reason CoMI wasn't well received was a combination of adventure games being on the way out (so not a great sale for casual gamers) and Ron Gilbert not being involved in it (so not a great pitch for fans either). But I have to agree that some of my favorite Monkey Island jokes came from this game, and I appreciate their attempt at "straightening" the ending of MI2.
As for the latest MI... it is my hot take that I would have been better off not playing it. It's competently made and has some good innovations for the point-and-click genre, but not even the characters seem like they want to be there. Then again, it has good ratings so other opinions exist.
CoMI felt to me like a game made by Monkey Island fans, rather than coming from an original place. I don't mean that it's a fangame, but that SoMI 1 and 2 had been out long enough that people had played them, gone into the industry, and worked on CoMI with an idea of "what a Monkey Island game 'should' be like". When I played it I felt there were a lot of structural similarities to previous games (let's do insult swordfighting again) and obligatory call-outs (like Stan).
Yeah, the latest MI is one of the few games I wished I never played: it managed to somewhat taint my childhood experiences, as it wrapped up the story in such a bad way to be retroactive (past self / reader: if you don't know, please don't look it up, it's not worth it).
It's a true shame as it could have been a cute finale, just ended up being rubbish for me.
> It nails that mixture of whimsy, cleverness, and sweetness that has made The Secret of Monkey Island arguably the most beloved point-and-click adventure game of all time.
> During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island‘s humor is nothing like that.
Is that really true, though? I can't think of any significant examples of games from the '80s or '90s that involved "in-groups punching... on out-groups", unless the out-groups in question were space aliens, nazis, fantasy monsters, hostile AIs, or the like.
Monkey Island is an absolute classic, of course, but this particular point feels almost like a retcon of present-day cultural assumptions into a specific context in the past where the objects of this criticism weren't really quite so present.
This is true, but those games were noted at the time for being crude and offensive. There was actually quite a bit of dislike for all of the above, and they were seen at the time as the exception rather that the norm.
I can think of the occasional bad-taste joke in an adventure game, but I don't think it was ever as pervasive as is implied.
For such a male-dominated industry creating a game for a largely male audience, it is impressive how well and positively women were portrayed in the MI games.
Elaine in particular is brave, smart, skillful, a leader, but also loving, kind. The character is not flattened to a single characteristic or narrative function. Even when she needs to be saved, when you get there, she already saved herself (in MI 1 or 2, I don’t remember).
The adventure game market wasn't quite so male-dominated, especially where Sierra was concerned, with a large number of female game designers, and multiple influential games with well-developed female protagonists 1-2 years before even the original Monkey Island came out.
Thanks, didn’t know. I knew about Roberta Williams, but I did not play the Sierra games much (that I remember, only Kings Quest 3, which was the first adventure game I ever played).
I adored this in Return to Monkey Island, as well. Elaine and Guybrush just have a … functional relationship. They love and support each other and they get along well. It's an important part of them as characters, but it's just there, and you don't have to worry, and the plot doesn't revolve around it. I found it refreshing.
actually, I found their relationship in Return to Monkey Island really weird. In that Elaine forgives basically everything that Guybrush does, even in the last act. It's (somehow) understandable wrt to the ending itself, but it certainly was out of character wrt the older titles in the series and as such I did not like it.
Not cheating, the reference (a tree carving IIRC) would be in the tree before the events of the first game of the series, so before guybrush would have met Elaine. It’s understandable that she would have lovers before guybrush, but the implication that one could have been the big bad LeChuck, makes guybrush fume, even if it’s just an initial.
This is one of the things I really really liked in the original two MIs. The characters ...and especially the relation between tough Elaine and Guybrush ("you're so helpless and cute").
I think they did not get this "right" in the newest part and it's my main problem with it.
>For such a male-dominated industry creating a game for a largely male audience, it is impressive how well and positively women were portrayed in the MI games.
Wait a second, why is that surprising? As if to you, something being male dominated must usually mean women being portrayed negatively by men, and if they're not then it's a surprise.
Sorry, but your comment just reeks of sexism by assuming mens' default is to not have a positive portrayal on women.
I do think it is more about wide feedback than 'men can't portray women well'. It's easy to overcorrect or make weak characters (not only women) when you're in a monoculture and your feedback come from the same kind of people. My example is Raymond E. Feist. His characters (especially female, but not only) were really weak before he partnered with Wurts (which, in my opinion, gave birth to their best work), and in all his following books all his characters were way better than in his first works.
It's not sexist to acknowledge reality, and back in the 90s male-dominated media very much did have a tendency to portray women badly. The further back you go, the worse the problem gets.
In general, society has moved to be less and less tolerant of bigotry over time. Given that, you should expect that older media will be more bigoted than we currently tolerate.
This ignorant attitude about the past is currently shaping a trend of 2 dimensional characters in culture. All female characters must be strong and good, all males must be weak and evil. The same with racial depictions; whites are evil, blacks are good. The bigotry hasnt gone away, it's reversed, and become stronger.
I mean, go back far enough and people used to own black people and thought women weren't fit to vote. The extraordinary claim here would be that everything was resolved by the 90s
its almost as if most men are not crazily sexist pigs, that only cares about scantily clad female characters in video games. Its ALMOST as if there is much much to it than that
I have nothing but praise for this game. It’s a standout example of how great art transcends its medium. Despite the technical limitations of the mid-90s, it’s still a beautifully drawn, beautifully scored joyful experience.
A Pirate I Was Meant To Be is on our family playlist for long car journeys with the kids.
Also, I’m not sure if this can ever be proven, but I’m convinced the chain of influence from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Ride to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Movie goes at least partly via Monkey Island.
Tim Powers' pirate fantasy book On Stranger Tides is a very important link in this chain. Gilbert's said it was a major influence, and the first Pirates movie had a lot of Tides' vibes. Pirates 4 was a straight-up adaptation of the book.
...An adaptation which kept nearly nothing about the book, sadly.
It's a great novel (if you excuse some minor flaws, like the protagonist's lightning-fast mastering of sailing after he becomes a pirate) which deserves a proper adaptation, but now that Disney owns the rights, that will likely never happen.
> In more practical terms, however, it steered the burgeoning Monkey Island franchise straight into a cul de sac with no obvious escape.
Without getting into (almost any specific) spoilers of the last 10 seconds of the game... this claim is completely untrue. The hint at a sequel is right there in the open, as the ending implies LeChuck is still at large.
At the end of MI2, "Chuckie" looks at the screen and his eyes flash, implying he's still really LeChuck. Additionally, there's scene of Elaine speculating about a voodoo curse. Ron Gilbert never "sequel-proofed" the game; the route that MI3 takes was deliberately left open.
I loved this game growing up, but never got around to finishing it. I've been going back and playing point & click adventures like Grim Fandango and Broke Age. IMO that genre didn't age well. So many interactions are counterintuitive and I inevitably feel like I have to read a guide in order to proceed with the narrative.
Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved.
Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game.
Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway.
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Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.
Most P&C adventures can be reasonably completed on your own if you have the right mindset. But if you do get stuck and don't have the patience to figure things out then consider UHS [0] first before resorting to a full-on walkthrough.
Even back then, excessive "pixel hunting" was a frequent complaint of the genre. You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens.
On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination.
> You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens.
Not at all just like you don't need to save scum in action games. Both are soft cheats used when you are unable to complete the game properly - but that's on you not the game.
I doubt that my own lack of skill would've resulted in the creation of a whole term and corresponding TVTropes...
Game design was still in its adolescence back then, and EGA/VGA resolutions didn't easily allow for clearly noticeable graphics for every item on the screen, especially in cluttered scenes (like in Fate of Atlantis: https://i0.wp.com/presentperfectgaming.com/wp-content/upload..., what item is or isn't clickable?)
I was a huge adventure game fan back in the 90s, and I also completed BG3 a few months ago ( it took me a solid 6 months to finish the game ). Quite frankly, I truly think there are no puzzles whatsoever in bg3. Very very very occasionally you need object X to satisfy character Y, but that’s about it. I think this is partly due to the game changing directions based on what you do ( so you can’t get stuck and therefore there’s no puzzle solving !) , but I never had the same feeling I had with monkey island, fate of Atlantis etc.
Maybe they're not strictly "puzzles" in the traditional LucasArts or Myst sense, but maybe more like "problems". That is, you have a lot of agency as a player in determining the outcome of your quests, companions, world events, etc., and you're not tied into any one way of achieving those. Given a quest, it's never just "gather X, put them together in Y fashion, then use them to Z". There's almost always a way to talk your way to a different solution, or use violence, or subterfuge, or a spell, or shapeshifting, or jumping/flying over the location, etc.
I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed).
By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn).
The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.)
Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.
Ah ! I had indeed misunderstood you, thanks a lot for the clarification.
We definitely agree. I thoroughly enjoyed bg3, and remember feeling no resistance because things would play out the way I wanted them to happen.
Apart from the occasional fighting parts, I’ve wondered quite a bit about what makes bg3 a challenge - and I still don’t have the answer, probably because there’s little to no challenge in bg3. I’ve decided though that the game is not about the technical challenge ( or any challenge for that matter ) but about the fact that you can freely bend the story to your wishes , and do things the way you want, and the problems you solve are the ones that, to some extent, you choose to create / address - what you call ‘problems’ and I agree with you.
This makes the game structurally different from COMI ( which is about solving puzzles so about meeting some kind of challenge ), but neither more nor less enjoyable- they’re just different games.
I think the mistake here was using guides. I used guides when I first played them and I remember feeling similar about them. I replayed some games again over the years, without guides, after enough time had passed so that I couldn't remember much anymore - it was a completely different experience, and much more enjoyable. Sure, sometimes you have to basically brute-force your way forward, but often enough you do figure stuff out and it's rewarding, you feel like you're starting to 'get' the humor.
My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in...
It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm?
I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.
On the plus side, in the modern era, you can easily find a walkthrough to help you through whatever. Though many are not well-structured to avoid spoilers when you drop into the middle of them.
I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked).
Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.
Day of the Tentacle is also one of the few point and clicks I've finished from beginning to end without consulting a walkthrough. This is actually one reason that I personally prefer it to COMI, the puzzles in DOTT generally are sensible/logical for the most part, especially by genre standards.
The absolute worst puzzle for me remains the infamous Broken Sword/Circle of Blood Irish goat scene:
I made it so close to finishing without a guide, but I never thought to Close the Door, and wasted hours trying to find the next thing before finally giving up.
>You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds
Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.
As someone who grew up with these games, I played through and liked MI3 when it came out it, but the graphics style always felt off to me.
The exaggerated art style didn't mesh with that of the first two games. The art style of the first two is of course whimsical, but it's within the realm of photorealism. MI3, however, leans heavily into the Chuck Jones style of cartoons, with huge heads and spindly bodies, against super-exaggerated backgrounds where not a single straight corner can be seen.
It's not just that Guybrush looks completely different in MI3 — he's certainly not a tall, lanky fellow in MI1-2 (though in the "remastered" versions LucasArts retconned his look) — he feels like an entirely new and different character. The world also feels like a different universe entirely. It's a different island, sure, but it just doesn't feel like the dark and atmospheric environment of the first two games.
There's overall a weird lack of continuity here, and the heritage of Day of the Tentacle is apparent. DotT is of course about as Chunk Jones-y as you can get, with a huge dab of the wacky art style of Ren & Stimpy and Animaniacs. MI3 feels designed by people who wanted to do their own thing.
What's really weird and off-putting is the art style of MI6. I don't know what they were thinking. I guess they didn't think Guybrush was thin enough in the previous iterations?
Going full wacky-pirate-adventure and changing the graphical style is arguably better, though, than trying more closely to imitate Gilbert and inevitably coming up short.
Claiming a sequel that aligned more with the look and feel of the original couldn't have worked is neither here nor there, because it was never attempted, and so it can't be dismissed as the wrong way to go.
I remember particularly adoring the art style at the time, possibly because it was so different from the other games at the time. Especially the clouds.
The art style wasn't so different, though. Discworld II, Broken Sword, and Toonstruck (all of which came out around the time CoMI was announced) all had similarly hand-painted, high-resolution art.
Earl Boen, the late actor who voiced LeChuck in this game, would be recognised by many from his profilic career across the past several decades of television, movies and video games.
He was in everything from The Wonder Years and Seinfeld to the Terminator movies. Game-wise, his resume included entries from series like Baldurs Gate, Krondor, Zork, Star Trek, Metal Gear Solid, and as the narrator of World of Warcraft.
An excellent write up on this great game! One particularly striking element of Curse to me is the soundtrack. Michael Lands compositions for the series is absolutely perfect in this high fidelity form. The familiar themes from the earlier games take on a whole new dimension and the music has its own narrative which perfectly complements the visuals and gameplay. A masterpiece in its own right. I still find myself loading it up on YouTube and playing it in the background while working or doing house chores.
I'm really surprised a Monkey Island movie hasn't been made yet.
Yes, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie originally started as a Monkey Island screenplay. But that franchise is basically dead now, and with the popularity of sassy, fourth-wall breaking sendup movies I think it would do gangbusters.
The lore and the humor and the characters are already there - it's a shame they are locked to this increasingly small audience of people who have patience for point and click adventure games.
I was always a, huge fan of this one. It's my favourite in the series.
Monkey Island 1 was also good. But 2 was too complicated and the puzzles too contrived. And it was soooo slow on Amiga. But 3, wow. I love the art style, the way the characters are drawn, the jokes etc. The goodsoup family. It was a really great game.
In contrast, 4 was really ugly with its primitive 3D graphics, stupid Starbucks jokes etc.
It was such a shame we didn't get the other 2 Loom games that were planned. (and iirc there's an easter egg that you can find, that directly hints at the content for the next game)
On the Mac it was a quite beautiful game. Later on I tried different (Windows / DOS) versions with ScummVM but they're a disappointment. Same with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I am not sure if the Mac versions are playable in ScummVM.
Loom looks way better on a CRT than it does in e.g. dosbox. It is easily the best looking EGA game ever made (if that's not damning it with faint praise).
Impactful indeed. I remember a lot of games for being fun, having impressive graphics, etc. But the MI series instilled in me a sense of nostalgia and longing for a time and a place that I’ve never been and that never really existed, and it’s a feeling that I still get when I think about the games or hear the music from them.
> The danger of increased resolution and color count was always that the finished results could veer into a sort of photo-realism, losing the ramshackle charm that had always been such a big part of Monkey Island's appeal.
This is a weird perspective; The Secret of Monkey Island already uses photorealistic graphics. Curse is much cartoonier.
I remember getting my first PC at thirteen and have some pirated games on it, Quake 2, Descent Freespace, Moto Racer (Enter your name!), and The Curse of Monkey Island was something different, so wholesome and funny, I was in love with Elaine, it also make me interested on storytelling, I guess because of that game I started to watch more movies and read more books.
And this game have the option to hear all the voices on Spanish, it wasn't something common, so me knowing no English at all, it was a new gaming experience and the connection was deeper.
"Nerdcore Dub versions from 'The Secret of Monkey Island I & II' adventure game soundtracks (1990/91), the forgotten Voodoo-Reggae classics from the floppy disc age."
But why? Just play with a mild CRT shader in ScummVM and it looks fine.
Also considering the art style of the MI1/2 remasters as well as whatever the art in Return is supposed to be I really don't want to find out how they would butcher MI3.
I dunno, I recently came off of a couple of Monkey Island 1 - 2 playthroughs and after starting this one, I couldn't help but feel that it was very laborious to talk to a few NPCs - some conversations would last way longer than I remember. It's funny because this is what I treasured the most about the previous games.
I ended up shelving it for the time being. Maybe it takes off after a while? Could always give another shot.
Ah those were the days. We’d buy the game, go home, play for hours end, get stuck, then call our friends the next day to exchange information and see if someone has progressed further. It created a form of belonging and exploration that’s long gone.
Just a masterpiece. The graphics and musical are just wonderful and inspiring. Enigms are good and the story solid.
Plus I played it when I was young, so it's special to me
I absolutely adored The Curse of Monkey Island, and still do, having gone back and finished it 3 or 4 times.
It was my first encounter with the series and even after the remastered versions I couldn't go back and get into the first 2 because they simply felt less developed, less funny, and less interesting. I know those that have started with them would think that's a travesty, but here we are.
The second is my least favorite. Maybe sour grapes because I was stuck on one puzzle for about 6 months, and when I finally got past it, that ending was a major letdown.
Great article for a great game. I loved every Monkey Island game (maybe just “liked” the 4th). I even loved the ending of this last one, that was, again, controversial.
For some reason I never quite understood, it wasn’t that well received when it came out. My stance on this one hasn’t changed in 27 years and I firmly believe it is the pinnacle of the genre : incredible art, hilarious, crazy but somehow logical puzzles, great music, and above all extraordinarily well written. Very very few games had me laugh in front of my computer. And don’t forget the brilliant voice acting.
I’ve just bought the latest title in the series but haven’t played it yet - I somehow fear it won’t be able to match COMI. I will also be introducing my kids to this incredible work of art - they will never hear about this from their friends at school, and I feel this is typically the kind of thing I can and probably should share as a parent.
Lucas folks, thanks for making this game.