Ron Gilbert sucks at endings for his games. I knew that before playing Return to Monkey Island (RtMI), and it has not changed my opinion. Thankfully there is more to this game than a terrible ending.

Let’s start with the UI. Thing’s have come a long way since 1990. The wall of verbs was jettisoned from the genre closer to Monkey Island than to RtMI. The now standard held-tab key is present, highlighting all the interactable objects and exits. When the mouse points to an interactable object, a description of the actions are described explicitly, and labelled with their respective mouse buttons.

Further, when you have selected an item from your inventory, a “🚫” indicator appears over the item icon if it won’t do anything meaningful with the object under the mouse: you can quickly scrub an item over everything in your inventory or the scene without having to try to actually use it, eliminating one of the biggests sources of busywork from the game. Unfortunately this wasn’t taken to the natural conclusion, and holding tab will still highlight all the interactable objects in a scene even if they are not appropriate for the current object.

You can press comma to step backward through the dialog you’ve already heard; no more revisiting dialog trees to catch a detail you missed. You can bring up the map of the current region at nearly any time and fast travel to where you need to go. No need to schlep from High Street, though Low Street, and down to the Scumm Bar to reach the docks for example. More busywork eliminated.

Also nice is the integrated, context-aware hint book. There aren’t many moon-logic puzzles in this game. I did get stumped a couple of times by procedural misunderstandings, and being able to quickly get unstuck without accidentally seeing spoilers is a real boon. The biggest benefit to me was in Part 5, the final section of the game. I used the heckins out of the hint book to just plow through the worst puzzles of the game. More on this later.

The game is structured with a tutorial/prelude followed by five main chapters. This is a game steeped in nostalgia and references to prior games. The prelude recapitulates and recontextualizes the final scenes from Monkey Island 2, it’s clever all though a bit confusing, raising questions that are ultimately addressed in unsatisfying ways later in the game. The prelude also sets up a framing narrative for the remaining chapters. Overall very good.

Parts 1–3 are essentially a structural callback to the original Monkey Island 1, with Guybrush trying to get a ship and crew to set out for Monkey Island in Part 1, at see trying to cast the voodoo spell in Part 2, and on Monkey Island itself for Part 3. Part 4 is loosely the middle of Monkey Island 2 with a set of islands with interlinked puzzles to solve. Some of weakest—but not the worst—moments of the game are pure here’s a think you remember from the original game, and here it is now, with a light twist. The best moments, as you might expect, cleverly twist that nostalgia in a new direction. Part 2 in particular is great. Thankfully, while there is a callback to Insult Swordfighting, we don’t have to revisit that whole thing again.

Throughout the game, the puzzles are fair. There’s little-to-no moon logic, and generally speaking, the information needed to solve the puzzles is presented to the player in the game. One nice detail of the puzzle design is that there are two themes that are recapitulated over and over again, one around keys (a gaming staple, but cleverly revisited here), paperwork or documentation. This is one of my favorite design moves for an adventure game; like a pure puzzle game the player learns the basic mechanics of the puzzle, and then builds on that with clever twists as the game progresses.

A highlight of the game is the writing of Elaine. In the original game, she’s competitent and self sufficient, while Guybrush is fairly hapless. Later games in the franchise (Curse of Monkey Island, Tales of Monkey Island) undermine her character. With RtMI, Elaine is back to being independant, succesful, and driven. She cares about Guybrush and his ridiculous quest, but she’s busy trying to solve scurvy in the Carribean. She is woven in and out of the main narrative, saving Guybrush’s bacon on several occasions.

By Part 4, a narrative thread emerges highlighting Guybrush’s reckless and myopically destructive approach to finding the titual secret. We get cut aways with Elaine talking to people about the damage Guybrush has caused. And this brings us, ultimately, to Part 5.

Part 5 starts strong. Guybrush and Elaine walking through the jungle on Monkey Island and talking about the secret, and Guybrush’s obsession with it. And then, before that thread is resolved, Elaine and Guybrush are separated, and the player is thrown into a linear cavalcade of dullness. Three sets of puzzles with a structural theme but no mechanical relationship, and no real relationship to the narrative except as filler to make Part 5 take longer. The culimation of these three dull puzzles is a wheel spinning code, cued with a riddle. Worse, you need to revisit the previous three dull puzzles and realise that an obscure detail in each is the key for decoding the code wheel. None of this recapitulates any of the puzzle solving done earlier in the game. As I mentioned previously I hit the hint book for the full solutions. I would have just abandoned the game otherwise.

Once you make it through this it’s time for the full Gilbert, the ending, a proper Thimbleweed¹. I don’t understand why Gilbert keeps returning to this meta-reveal at the end of his games. Just like Monkey Island 2, and Thimbleweed Park, the game ends with a surprise reveal that the the game has actually been a themepark all along! What a twist. The titular secret? An all I got was this lousy t-shirt t-shirt. What annoys me with these endings is that they don’t recontextualize the prior game in a meaningful way. Instead providing a lense to reinterpret the experience and narrative it just severs the narrative and leaves some dull self-impressed posturing.

RtMI is different from Thimbleweed in that it presents multiple endings depending the players choices. Whether you bother looking at The Secret at the end or not, what you say if you talk to Elaine in the theme park, or if you return to the fantasy world of Monkey Island rather than accepting the themepark outcome. Ultmately I felt like this makes the end of RtMI less meaningful than Thimbleweed as it doesn’t have an opinion about what the end should be. But at the same time—and this might be informed by going into this expecting Gilbert to not land the plane—the ending wasn’t such an aggressive middle finger to the player.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the game, despite it’s flaws. At about 8 hours play time, it’s long enough to be engaging without (aside from Part 5) outstaying its welcome. I played it on Apple Arcade with a free trial. I was never going to buy this game if I had to pay actual money for it due to my experience with Thimbleweed.

1. Thimbleweed Park, Gilbert’s contender for most-player-hostile ending in a videogame.