I don’t like it. It looks like a 2001 Flash animated video. The Tales of Monkey Island looked a lot better to me.
If the game is fun enough, I can overlook it. But I don’t care for the trend of doing extremely crude graphics to be trendy (or lazy).
I do love 4, but admit the controls were tough to get used to. What logic puzzles were questionable?
The art looks like the art from a bajillion other indie games. It’s not bad, although at this point it pings me as “We didn’t have the budget for more detailed art” than “We wanted a unique and fun style” simply because I’ve seen so many similar looking graphics in other games. Sort of feels generic at this point rather than distinctive.
I never played the previous games though and won’t play this one so I have no skin in the game. Saw some samples of all the overwrought nasty blowback by keyboard warriors today though which affirmed that gamers are the worst. Life was better back when it cost an envelope and a stamp to send your thoughts to creators.
Ron Gilbert has shelved his blog due to personal attacks from people who dislike the new style.
I don’t remember completely, but especially the blind prosthesis salesman’s filing system. Though I guess it’s not that bad, I’ve played Sierra Adventures, and the worst LucasArts game puzzles were better than 90% of those (“haha you forgot to pick up kleenex 40 screens ago? Time to restart!”)
I trust Ron Gilbert (who worked on the first two, plus other Lucas Arts adventures) to keep the puzzles completely fair. He’s written about those days of point-and-click adventures and over the years has refined his puzzle-making philosophy such that he is careful to avoid these. (The worst is the monkey wrench puzzle from one of the MIs, especially if you are playing an internationalized version in translation where it even makes less sense given the English-specific pun it involves.) I played his last adventure game, Thimbleweed Park, and, while some puzzles were difficult, none were illogical and certainly none were Sierra Adventure-level madness where you get killed for no reason every second step.
I always liked the Sierra joke reference in the first game when Guybrush falls off the cliff.
I hadn’t watched the trailer and have no intention to. Nor on making any judgments until I play it.
I’ll still get the game on the basis that it’s another friggin’ Monkey Island game (!) and the bona fides of the creative team are solid.
If I end up not liking the artwork, that’s among the least possible sins the game can commit. Aesthetic judgment is terrifically subjective, after all. Bad puzzles, on the other hand, would be a killer, but this team is unlikely to mess up that part of the design.
Yeah, I think it’s unlikely there will be any issues with the humor, characters, storyline, and puzzles with Ron Gilbert at the helm. Like I said before, his last point-and-click was terrific and captured the spirit of 80s/90s adventures, and was filled with every bit of humor those were (which is what I loved most about Ron Gilbert games.)
I’m just not seeing the art issues the Internet is seeing. First, there’s not a hell of a whole lot of actual gameplay to see in that clip, but I love the use of color and cartoon-type graphics. I just don’t see anything wrong with it aesthetically. I personally, like I said, would have liked a more 80s/90s throwback style like with his last project, but that’s fairly niche. It may help that I’m not much of a gamer, so I don’t actually like super-detailed graphics (if that is part of the issue.) There’s nothing that outright turns me off there, and if the gameplay and humor are there, I could care less.
I tried hard to remember Monkey Island 4’s unfair/strange puzzles and the only one I did think of was the blind prosthesis puzzle. I am not surprised that is the one that stands out. I might have used a guide/hint-system on that one.
They look like flat 2-dimensional papers cut-outs with minimal animation.
Sort of like this:
The art itself is a particular aesthetic that I don’t mind. It was the animation that bothered me.
It’s also a departure from every other game in the series. It dissent look right.
It comes out September 19 and get this, if you pre-order, they will give you:
Horse Armor
It does nothing in game, but it’s neat!
I like how the article makes no attempt to explain the Horse Armor joke. You either get it or you don’t. But I suppose anyone old enough to be hyped for Monkey Island also probably lived through the drama.
(To not be coy for people not around then, one of the first major shifts to microtransactions in games and pointless cosmetic DLC was in 2006 with Bethesda selling “horse armor” for your mount in Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. For $2.50, people expected some sort of mechanical benefit but just got a reskin of their mount. Horse Armor because synonymous with pointless money-grabbing from the publishers)
It is out today and I’ll probably pick it up fairly soon. It’s getting, I think, good reviews. I know IGN gave it a 9/10.
Cool! I preordered it, and downloaded it a couple hours ago, but I’m resisting the temptation to play, as I’ve got a lot of work on my slate for the day, and I know that will just eat up the hours. Glad to hear the reviews are coming in positively. I don’t expect any less from Ron Gilbert & crew. A quick scan of Reddit seems to say at least some who have been put off by the graphics have come around (I didn’t mind what I saw before, and I didn’t know what in the hell people were bitching about.)
Complete game (no repeats of choices) here. Yahtzee’s review; he predictably takes serious issue with the ending. Massive spoiler warning for both, obviously.
For starters, I noticed a great deal of tiresome aging white guy nonsense. Kids today are so disrespectful! Those warnings on medication commercials go on forever! Skeptics are so ignorant! You’ve heard this pathetic howl of outrage fifty million times, how this waste of oxygen could act like a destructive inconsiderate jerk with complete impunity and now he can’t anymore, what is this world coming to? 
Good gods, tell it to someone who freaking cares. It royally chafes me when any kind of creator airs his dirty diapers in a product intended as entertainment that costs real money. (Why yes, I did resent the hundreds of dollars I squandered on sex videos that weren’t worth the boxes they came in, why do you ask?) You’re mad at the world? Fine, put it in a tweet so I can waste three seconds on your worthless opinion and get back to things that matter a crap. Geez. 
Other than that, based on what I’ve seen… it’s servicable enough. There seems to be a lot of mean-spiritedness, but I haven’t played all the way through Curse and Escape yet, so that my just be par for the course. I’m not a fan of the art style, but I can’t say it’s any worse than in previous games (Curse was the best, but that wasn’t happening again), mostly simplistic. Plotwise, the two things that seemed the most forced were LeChuck being here at all (he was very definitively put paid to at the end of Tales) and Guybrush being needlessly destructive. (That whole scene with the mop handle tree, in particular, was just baffling. Why did he do that??)
And yes, I’ll say it: It is a good thing that the puzzles are easy and there’s an in-game hint book provided. This is the mark of a company that is grounded in reality. The reason games had outrageously obtuse puzzles in the past was so the company could give the answers away via the 900 number hint line. No, really, that was it. None of this bullcrap about “real achievement” or “proper challenge” or “not patting you on the head”. It was a crass, brass, stone cold, shameless, lowdown filthy disgusting ploy to make lots of money. The creative team point-blank says this in the commentary of the LeChuck’s Revenge special edition. Making the game much more accessible, and putting the focus more on travel and interactions than untying hopelessly complex knots, is a tacit acknowledgement that we don’t live in that world anymore. Yes, it is possible to look up the solution to anything now, no, kids of today aren’t going to spend hours and hours trying to find the answer, so your game cannot be about that. Whatever criticisms you have have about this game, it got this completely right.
And then…there’s the ending. 
I’ll keep this as concise as possible (because Morgan Le Flay knows I’ve rambled on long enough 
). Ron…I get that you’re not young and hungry anymore. I get that your priorities have changed. I get that you don’t like dealing with fans. You charge real money for a complete game, you provide a complete game. I don’t care how tired or worn out or weak or sick or burned out you are, once you take payment, you lose the right to not give a crap. If you can’t be bothered to tell a full story, including the ending, hand the reins to someone who can.
I’ll wait on this. There should be a special or whatever edition of this a few years down the line, at which point it might be worth it for the nostalgia value.
I’m 3/4 of the way through it (so haven’t seen the ending), but so far, I’m enjoying the heck out of it. I saw that Yahtzee review, and I have no idea why he’s so negative about it (I normally enjoy his reviews). I mean, I have some minor criticisms, but so far it’s about an 8/10 game for me. Note that I am most definitely not an avid gamer, but point and clicks were my favorite genre as a kid in the 80s/90s. That genre was more challenging back then, but also made me want to throw a brick through my monitor half the time in frustration. Those games sometimes took us months on-and-off to finish, which was fine when games were like $50-$100 a pop in 2022 dollars. Now, I just want a game to occupy me for about ten to twenty hours, and be done with it. This game does perfectly fine.
I also like the artwork fine. I don’t quite understand the bitching about the graphic stylings (MI 3,4,and 5 all looked much worse to me).
I have no idea how far into the game I am, I guess past halfway but I dunno. I’m trying to gather golden keys. But I am really enjoying it. It feels very much like the original two, and ties up loose ends very cleverly, without negating any of the subsequent games that Ron Gilbert wasn’t involved in (indeed, some characters, and voice actors, visibly maintain the continuity, if you can call it that).
The art style is not my favourite, but it’s fine. The puzzles are the right level of challenge. The way you can get game hints sure beats the old way of looking up magazine letters pages. It’s all good.
I just finished it today with my daughter, and I found it thoroughly enjoyable. My rating of 8/10 from above stands. All of the puzzles were fair (except one that I may have torn my hair out without a hint that I figured the solution to and what I was looking for, but overlooked. I would’ve figured it out in the end a la the old days of spending hours after school tracing and retracing all the rooms, but it frustrated me because I knew the answer, just not where to find it). The last main puzzle I actually just tripped upon by accident. I was looking for a slightly different solution, but happened to get it through partially dumb luck.
I thought the ending fine. I won’t spoil it, of course. It’s a perfectly satisfying, above-average point-and-click. I played on the hard mode, and I found that, overall, pretty easy. I can’t imagine how easy the lower difficulty is. My main point of criticism might be for slightly harder puzzles, and maybe more varied ones. But for modern point-and-click games with their gameplay philosophy, it ranked probably slightly more challenging than average. It’s definitely more satisfying than something like Broken Age (which is over a decade old now.) But it was noticeably easier than Ron Gilbert’s last project, Thimbleweed Park. The last set of puzzles did feel slightly rushed to me – the ones on Terror Island before the ending. I just flew through those without much thought whatsoever, especially since you were essentially sandboxed at that point with your inventory and only a few rooms to explore, so your “search tree” for possible solutions was narrowed substantially.