Return to Monkey Island

Spoiler-free

Released on the international "Talk Like a Pirate" day, RtMI was at least automagically preloaded on the Switch, so I didn't have to waste most of my limited playing time installing and such. I didn't do long gaming sessions, as I guess was expected, something from thirty minutes to something short of a full hour. I also wasn't rushing around, instead I wondered and adventured in peace with all the time in the Caribbean.

My own Monkey Island history was limited to the multiple times completed first two games, and the third one I once loaned from a friend. The fresher entries (Escape and Tales) had somehow completely flown past me, but as this one was the part 3b, did it matter much?

As I was also absolutely oblivious to anything in parts 4 and 5, I also had no idea where they took place. Therefore I had no way of telling how many times we had returned to the Mêlée Island since tSoMI. None of that mattered, the scenery was familiar but also renewed, at least in the beginning.

You may have noticed that I clearly didn't say anything about how the ending of tSoMI 2 and the beginning of RtMI were connected. Based on my memory of the intro I saw once (a quarter of a century earlier) was a bit weird as it ignored its predecessor's ending.

🎶 The Scumm Bar - Ambiance 🎶

My first playthrough on Switch took, according to the device's own calculations, "over 10 hours" and I didn't dig out everything I could and poke absolutely every corner. To be honest, I had to ask for a hint a couple of times from the hint book, and only once to the deepest level. The hint book was a fun thing: you could ask if for a tip to complete one of the incomplete items on your todo list. First of the hints was very generic ("did you already hear about subject x?") and a dialogue option by dialogue option it got more and more specific, until at last it said something like "Go to the Scumm Bar and eat a candle!". The one time I really couldn't get it myself, the feeling afterwards was, as you'd expect: "aaaaah, of course". Gentle shame included.

The vast majority of the puzzles got completed just by going around and doing stuff accidentally the right way, or after a bit of head scratching. Some of the things got solved with the traditional "pick up everything you can as soon as you've seen it", so sometimes I didn't even know what I had solved when I picked it up, before seeing the puzzle itself.

Music of Monkey Island was again excellent and it changed by the situation, as it should. Maybe I could find the OST from somewhere to accompany the first two. As far as I could say, the voice acting worked fantastically, I just didn't remember more than two of the characters and one of them was Dominic Armato's Guybrush. Then again, when I was playing the originals, they didn't have voices but coloured text :D

I had barely finished the game on the Nintendo when I also installed it on to my work laptop. Just to go through everything again but with more familiar controls and a bigger screen. Also because I didn't want the story to end, when the game ended.

A double-thumb-up recommendation from me.