InsaneBear

Review: The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

Score: Good
Difficulty played on: No difficulty options
Time to beat: 6 hours
Loved the most: Fantastically witty writing and humor
Hated the most: Tedious gameplay gets in the way of said humor

When LucasArts released The Secret of Monkey Island for the PC back in 1990, they put out what is generally regarded as one of the best point-and-click adventure games of all time, not to mention one of the funniest games ever. Fast-forward 19 years, and a new generation of gamers is getting treated to three-headed monkeys and insult swordfighting with the Xbox Live Arcade/PC remake, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. Now given that backdrop, I’d just like to say that this game feels like it’s from 1990, which may or may not be a bad thing depending on who you ask. For me, the gameplay really showed its age, but given that this is a remake, and it does what it does well, I’ll try not to knock it too much.

The most drastic change you’ll notice from the original game is the face-lift Guybrush Threepwood and friends have received for the HD era. The game has this very colorful hand-drawn visual style full of quirky animations that suit the tone wonderfully. The whole thing looks like something out of a children’s fairy-tale book, and I loved it. The update is even more pronounced when you hit the back button to seamlessly switch over to the original pixelated look, which is not so easy on the eyes to say the least.

Another update that will instantly jump out at you the second you switch over is the inclusion of voice acting. Pretty much every voice in the game fits its character perfectly and delivers the always hilarious dialogue in a way that makes the original text-based game unplayable. The music is another home-run in the audio department, as you’ll be humming the catchy Caribbean tunes to yourself whenever you’re not hearing them first-hand. Lastly, the general sound effects round out the top-notch sound design with just the right timing for comedic effect.

But unfortunately, that’s where the upgrading stops. Once you get past the whimsical graphics and pick up the controller, you’ll quickly realize how frustrating it is to “point and click” when simply pressing the analog stick would suffice. It’s just a tedious chore that seems like it would have been easy to bring up to date. Although, given how clunky their updated interface is, maybe I should be glad they didn’t tinker with movement. The new interface maps all your possible actions to the Left Bumper and all of your items to the Right Bumper. When you scroll over an item in the gameworld, the game isn’t smart enough to automatically select the proper action for you, as it usually just sticks with the default “Look at” action. So all too often you’ll be forced to fumble around with an interface menu that takes you out of the game. Things get especially complex when you have to select an action to use with one of your items to use with a game world item. It’s all manageable, but more difficult than it should be.

Lucky for us, the core game mechanic involves using said actions and items to solve what can be some very difficult, albeit funny puzzles. Pretty much all of the puzzles consist of having to find a specific item for a specific purpose, such as some bananas for a helpful monkey, a highly acidic beverage to melt a jail-cell lock, or a literal red herring for a menacing troll (who’s actually George Lucas in a troll costume!). The puzzles always have a logical and humorous solution, but their extreme linearity is frustrating. For example, when searching for the previously mentioned red herring, a pesky seagull was preventing me from retrieving the fish. With a boiling pot of stew mere feet away, one would assume that it could be of some use. But instead, I ended up having to use the hint system (which is a God-send given the relative lack of guidance) until it told me to walk over a board on the dock that proceeded to fling up and send the bird flying away. In every situation, there is only one way to solve a puzzle, and that became really frustrating for me.

Yet another source of irritation comes from the back-and-forth nature of your quests. The vast majority of puzzles require you to retrieve an item, take it to someone or someplace, go back to retrieve a new item and so on. This wouldn’t be such an issue if you could just instantly travel to your destination, but that’s not the case. And as much as I liked the cholesterol-conscious cannibals of Monkey Island, I wasn’t so keen on visiting their village four or five separate times. I suppose I wouldn’t have had to make as many trips if I had certain items in my possession before hand, but the previously mentioned lack of guidance really makes it difficult to know what to find, where to find it, and when I’ll need it. By the end of the game I was just constantly using the hints to speed things up as much as possible.

One more issue that arises from all the back-tracking is that the environments start to get a little repetitive, despite an initially good mix of different locations. However, that’s much less of an issue than the repetitive gameplay. Despite how well thought-out most of the puzzles are, they get old when it’s all you’re doing. The game really could have used some more variety in its core elements. Even if they just featured the insult swordfighting more prominently, which is tragically only a very brief portion of the game, it would have been something to change the pace a bit. As it is, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is just point-and-click puzzle after point-and-click puzzle.

Speaking of pacing, Monkey Island‘s biggest fault is the fact that the snail’s pace puzzle-solving gets in the way of the zany story and laugh-out-loud dialogue. It’s almost like watching three minutes of Seinfeld before a commercial breaks up the laughs for the next three minutes. Granted, the ways many of the puzzles are designed are inherently funny, but not nearly as gut-busting as the dialogue sequences or cut-scenes. For a game that’s all about a guy who wants to become a pirate and save his sweet little thing, there just isn’t any sense or urgency.

And unfortunately, after you beat The Secret of Monkey Island there really isn’t any urgent cause to come back to it. I’m not saying there should have been some sort of multiplayer component or leader boards or anything like that, I’m just warning everybody that this is pretty much six hours and done. Of course there are achievements to go back for, but given how little points they’re worth vs. how much work they require, it’s entirely understandable to just skip the replay. That said, the game only costs $10 and I feel as though I got my money’s worth with the laughs alone.

At the end of the day, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is one of the funniest games I’ve ever played, but offers little else. What I found most disheartening was that during the week I played it, I didn’t have that burning desire to go finish it whenever I wasn’t playing like I do with most games. The tedious and repetitive gameplay just couldn’t suck me in. But given that this is a remake of a game from 1990, I’m not going to knock its score down just because it doesn’t compete with Portal. It does point-and-click adventure well; I just don’t know if point-and-click adventures are really my thing…or anybody’s thing these days. Still, if you’re looking for some laughs and have $10 to blow, and you like Caribbean ghost-pirate music, you owe it to yourself to check out this quirky, intelligent, and consistently funny game.

Author: Cody

Tags: remake, ron gilbert, the secret of monkey island special edition, tim schafer, xbla, xbox 360