izigame.me

A Gutted Masterpiece

ATOMIC SPOILERS AHEAD
Most of my review would be parroting what others say so I need to say something else and that is the painful realisation that to meet deadlines the latter half of this game has been absolutely eviscerated, whole chunks of character and story haphazardly ripped out of the game leaving huge voids in their wake that grow more apparent and glaring the more you think about them and by the time you realise it's missing it's too late and the game is over and you can only feel sadness looking back, here are just a handful of things that were blatantly cut from the game without any care (or time before release to care) given to them.


Terror Island is crawling with locations that have literally nothing in them, the island is extremely well designed, the art is intense and something we've never seen in a Monkey Island game before, months of work must have gone into conceptualising and designing an island that the player will probably spend 10 minutes on at the most. A whole island for a single tiny puzzle. Areas with nothing, curious pieces of paper with a story dripping with mystery written on them are entirely pointless and serve only for the little icons on them that guybrush puts in the right order for no reason whatsoever. The whole island is ultimately wasted and almost certainly had a bigger role to play but is cast to the sidelines for reasons we will probably never know.
Cogg Island... You may or may not know about this, but if you find a very specific trivia card, answer it correctly it points you to a spot on the map you can dive to that will take you Cogg Island. A full island map underwater with 6 locations on it. The whole island is clockwork, has grandfather clocks and telecopes on it and a giant compass in the middle. You can visit all the locations but only one thing is interactable. If you visit the compass in the center of the island and click on the sign it reads "Welcome to Cogg Island. This Island was cut due to time issues, please get a glimpse of what might have been". This island looks absolutely fascinating and here it lies at the bottom of the ocean, a whole half finished island cut from the game. What a shame, what a waste of creativity.
The Corruption of Guybrush throughout the whole of Chapter IV something has been set up, Guybrush's obsession with the secret is actually quite destructive, he's lied, cheated and stolen his way across the seas and true he is a pirate. But he's supposed to be a good guy! This is pointed to in all kinds of ways. The constant cuts to Elaine talking to people who have been collateral damage in your rampage towards the Secret but also the pamphlet of all the "evil" things you should aspire to as part of Lechucks crew you get in Chapter II actually gradually ticks itself off as you progress through the game implying you're just as much of a dumbass as LeChuck, this builds and builds and builds and then prompty disappears in a puff of smoke the moment you open the safe at the end of the chapter. Bam Nothing a complete plot blue balling and totally rocked my shit. in the bad way. I want to know what they were going to do with this... it almost feels cruel.
Widey Bones is one of the few new characters in Return who is directly connected to the The Secret of Monkey Island™and again is set up heavily in the beginning of the game leering weird ramblings at you throughout the first chapter. Locke Smith mentions that Widey used to live next to her and for some unknown reason moved to the exact same location as her when she moved to Melee island. There is obviously supposed to be a connection between the two characters but upon the beginning of Chapter IV she shows up, a completely different character than she has been in the game so far, says she has a key and 5 minutes later basically says she has lost the key and proceeds to have absolutely no purpose or presence in the game. That's it. She's done. They even forgot to take out the reference to it in the ending of the game which is supposedly shows pastiches of things that have happened in the game shows LeChuck holding Locke Smith up by a foot when the two never actually interact for the whole game, implied or otherwise.
The little things aren't as bad as the others but they're there. Constant examples of actions they didn't have recorded lines for, reused voice lines that make no sense, extremely poignant art assets in scenes that aren't interactable but were blatantly going to be at one point, in places it feels like you're 10 steps behind another Guybrush who has solved half the puzzle for you before moving on. Doors are already unlocked, tunnels already dug, torches already lit etc etc. Once you notice it, you can't un-notice it.



Sailing into the Sunset


Ever since this game came out and people finished it there is already talk about will there be another one? Is this the end of the Monkey Island story? I don't want another Monkey Island but I want more. I want a directors cut of this game that does all the things that were originally planned. I want the rest of this game to be made, I want it to be complete I want everything Ron Gilbert initially imagined for this game to see the light of day and I know deep down that's never going to happen and that puts a melancholy filter on my memory of this game.
It's a good game, a great game. But it's not the game it could have been and the steam review system lets me choose between thumbs up and thumbs down and there's no way I could rate this thumbs down, but the thumbs up I'm giving comes with so many caveats it's not even funny.