Tales of Monkey Island – The Geekscape Review
For me, starting up the latest installment in the Monkey Island series was akin to Ted Danson walking back into the Cheers bar. The first Monkey Island game was life changing to me as an 11 year old swapping floppy disks on his dad’s old PC. I had played through Loom and was starting to mess around with Sierra games but up to that point no game fully resonated with me in the way that the original Secret of Monkey Island did in 1990. The characters, the puzzles, the humor, the storyline… everything seemed to work in unison to flip a creative switch in my brain. For the first time, I thought that someone had actually made a video game that spoke only to me!
Obviously, I was wrong. The Monkey Island series spoke to a lot of people… and, over the course of the next 10 years, three additional sequels worked to expand the universe of the Monkey Island games for an entire generation of PC gamers. But by the time that the fourth game arrived, the gaming landscape had completely changed from the early days of 1990. Google and the internet were now in every gamer’s home, and with them came an avalanche of game FAQs. No longer did adventure gamers have to work through puzzles patiently or use their wits to beat games. They could just look for answers online. Coupled with the rise of competitive social gaming, brought on by an onslaught of first person shooters like Doom and Golden Eye, real gaming cred no longer meant being the only one among your friends who knew the answers to the latest adventure game. With a little Googling, everyone knew the answers! And so, by the end of 2001, adventure gaming’s pulse had completely flatlined. I boxed up my old copies of Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island games and said goodbye to my old childhood friends. I honestly never expected to see any of them ever again.
Enter Tell Tale Games almost a decade later and their line of Sam and Max and Wallace and Gromit adventures. Enter the Wii and the DS, brand new consoles that brought with them a new influx of casual gaming to counteract the adrenaline culture of Halo that had taken my friends with it. Enter the downloadable episodic game, that allowed for quicker, more immediate content delivery and smaller development budgets and schedules. All of these elements came together to deliver a new pulse to the return of adventure gaming. The heart had long since gone cold, but one the eve of E3 a new pulse started to beat again. What more appropriate a means of bringing adventure gaming to a brand new generation than with my old friend Guybrush Threepwood and Tell Tales’ Tales of Monkey Island?
This past Saturday morning, while Laura was at work, I used her PC to download the press copy of the first chapter of the new Tales of Monkey Island adventure. It’s called The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal and promised about 4 hours of gameplay. I couldn’t contain my excitement as the title screen came up and I clicked to start a new game. I honestly couldn’t believe that after almost a decade, and after burying my dreams of ever playing a Monkey Island game again, I was moments away from experiencing a brand new adventure. I almost couldn’t contain myself.
The game starts out with a familiar scene: Guybrush’s wife Elaine has been kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck who is on the verge of unleashing a mystical curse that promises to make him all powerful. Things seem helpless when a familiar voice cuts the air: Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate! Right off the bat, it’s obvious that Tell Tale is going about things the right way. They’ve involved some of the original Monkey Island creators, gone to lengths of getting all of the original voice talent back and the writing is both familiar and fresh. Sure enough, after some puzzle solving, Guybrush has LeChuck right where he wants him and has run him through with an enchanted sabre… that he didn’t quite enchant the right way. The spell goes haywire, some barrels of gunpowder on the ship ignite and everything goes KABLAM! That’s when the game cuts to a wide shot of the exploding ship, floating in front of a Caribbean island, as Guybrush is thrown into the air and the boat overturns and starts to sink. Above the scene, the Tales of Monkey Island title comes up, the music starts to play and your truly starts to tear up.
Yeah. So what? I almost cried. It was an emotional moment for me. But I couldn’t in the end! You know why? Because there was still a whole lot of game to play. My adventure had just begun. And the game is solid. If anyone experienced the Monkey Island of old, Tell Tale has done a commendable job of making a game that fits perfectly in line with the first four installments. There are old characters that will bring you back and new characters that will spark your interest. Hell, there are even a couple of Murray references that had me laughing out loud. But regardless of how familiar everything feels, there is nothing in Tales of Monkey Island that should scare of brand new players. The story clips along steadily and the puzzles are pretty well spread out with the locations to keep players clicking and exploring brand new things. Like with the very best adventure games, sometimes I just found myself clicking on parts of the environment that I knew wouldn’t do anything important just so I could experience the characters’ responses. I found myself trying out items on the most senseless objects just to see what would happen. Before I knew it, I was adventuring again!
That’s not to say that Tales of Monkey Island is without it’s bumps. It took me a while, on Laura’s stripped down work PC, to get the proper settings running. I had been so spoiled by console gaming that the idea of having to adjust settings like the resolution size and the amount of detail was almost completely alien to me. Seriously, before you download the game, check out the requirements. I had to play this game on a quality setting of 1 (but once I made the change the game was seriously cruising!).
This brings me to my next critique: the artwork. Before I get too into it, it should be known that Tell Tales has only been working on the game for a few months. The writing, the audio, the gameplay are all fun and top notch. If anything, the constricted development time has mainly effected the character animation and 3D artwork. While the environments are pretty to look at and the fact that you can move Guybrush in all directions is amazing, it hurts to see some of the amazing voice acting come out of characters that don’t appear as visually fleshed out or rendered in the same amount of detail as the story. Some of the mouth syncing is sloppy and the flatness of some of the character modeling distract from just how engaging the characters are. If these problems could have been cleared up with a little bit more time spent on the final product or a bigger product download, sign me up for the special edition retail package. I don’t know how much of the detail suffered from my playing through the game at a quality level of 1 (hopefully a lot!) but I thought it was distracting at times.
The final critique I have really doesn’t have much to do with the game or Tell Tale Games’ work at all. It has to do with the fact that I waited almost 10 years to see my friends again and the entire experience was over in less than 4 hours. Now, I know that there are still four chapters left to download in the coming months, and I’m excited to experience all four chapters for myself in full, but the profound feeling of loss that I felt upon completing the chapter completely derailed my entire weekend and sent me into an emotional tailspin from which I have yet to fully recover. Those 4 hours that I spent trying to get Guybrush off of Flotsam Island (where he’d been stranded after blowing up LeChuck’s ship) so that he could go back to fixing the curse and rescuing Elaine was like 4 hours spent with some of my closest friends before saying goodbye for who knows how long a stretch of time. I almost started to cry all over again! I mean, this must be what a heroin addict feels like when he runs out of hits and is forced to go sober for a stretch!
Luckily, the re-skin of the original Secret of Monkey Island is arriving on PC and XBox Live next week. I’m pretty excited to relive those adventures and say hello to my old friends all over again. I wonder how much of the game (from 19 years ago!) I still remember. But will it be enough to get me through the next few weeks, or months, until the second installment of Tales of Monkey Island hits? Well, laddies, at least I can take refuge in knowing that that will be an adventure that all of us will have to experience together!
