Review: Return to Monkey Island is must-play point-and-click brilliance
Enlarge / That's the second-biggest title screen I've ever seen! (credit: Terrible Toybox / Lucasfilm Games)
For a certain kind of adventure gaming fan, no sentence is harder to hear than this: "I learned the secret of Monkey Island before you did." But I can now say it. I've played, completed, and fallen madly for Return to Monkey Island, a sequel more than three decades in the making. This is a game full of laughs, whimsy, and puzzles as carefully constructed as the stories that surround them.
But I'm not here to spoil any of your upcoming pirate fun. I've been writing reviews for long enough to remember how great it felt to read about a new video game before playing a single minute of it. That's how we did things while saving up enough money to get our own boxed copies of older Monkey Island games, then prying them open and figuring out their Dial-a-Pirate copy-protection puzzles.
Return to Monkey Island is nearly everything I'd hoped for in a modern return to the series. Its interface and controls split the difference between the expectations of hardcore genre fans and those of point-and-click novices. Its presentation and voice acting pair nicely to set an approachable and fiendishly hilarious tone. And the game's full journey, from bumpy waters to smooth, silly sailing, consistently feels personal, vulnerable, and reflective of its creators-which is to say, this is the opposite of a nostalgia-reeking cash-in.