Escape from Monkey Island is the fourth instalment in LucasArts’ beloved pirate series, and the first game not to appear on our 1001 list. Does this mean that this game doesn’t live up to the greatness of its predecessors?
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Escape from Monkey Island, the last of LucasArts’ adventure games to be released, was made with Sean Clark and Michael Stemmle as lead designers over ten years ago. Both had previously worked on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max Hit the Road (review coming soon), with the former also having a hand in Loom and The Dig. They obviously had a lot of experience going for them, but many asked how the pair come back from what many thought was a terrible ending in The Curse of Monkey Island.
I’ll say it once again: this series has been one of my all-time favourites since I first played The Secret of Monkey Island on my Amiga as a kid back in 1990. I still have the original discs for Escape from Monkey Island (take a look at the photo below) so, after playing the first three titles, I thought it would only be fair to dig them out and give the fourth instalment another go. During my original playthrough thirteen years ago I actually lost interest in the game and didn’t bother finishing it; would I be able to make it through this time around?
I still have the original discs from thirteen years ago!
At the end of the previous title, our swashbuckling hero Guybrush Threepwood and his blushing bride Elaine Marley headed off into the sunset on their honeymoon. But upon returning to Mêlée Island three months later they find that Elaine has been declared officially dead, her position as governor has been revoked and her mansion is scheduled to be demolished. A sleazy character known as Charles L Charles has put himself forward as the lead candidate; and an unscrupulous Australian land-developer Ozzie Mandrill is buying up land all over the place.
To top it all off, it’s not long before the evil undead pirate LeChuck is back on the scene too and everyone is searching for a talisman known as the Ultimate Insult. Guybrush must help Elaine stop the redevelopment of their homeland, win back her position as governor, and stop his nemesis from using the voodoo talisman to destroy the spirit of all those who hear it.
Why do evil undead pirates always seem to pop up at the most inappropriate moments?
Along with a characteristic storyline, a number of familiar faces make a welcome return – the Voodoo Priestess, Carla and Murray the evil skull to name but a few – and the humour that the series is known for is still there. However, a lot of the jokes won’t make sense unless you’ve played the previous games and I can see how this would put some new gamers off. For example, the fact that Otis the pirate likes flowers is a gag from the original title. But it’s mentioned a number of times throughout Escape from Monkey Island without a reference point, almost as if the designers are hoping you’ve played The Secret of Monkey Island and remember how funny the joke was the first time around.
The title makes used of a slightly-improved version of the GrimE engine, first introduced in Grim Fandango (review coming soon) in 1998. The SCUMM has also been replaced by the Lua programming language and this change is referenced in-game; after buying the SCUMM Bar, Mandrill replaces it with a tropical-themed sushi restaurant called the Lua Bar. These updates result in both positive and negative effects.
The SCUMM bar has been replaced by a new tropical-themed sushi bar – hope you like fish.
The pre-rendered backgrounds of the previous games have been upgraded to a 3D environment and this gives players a lot more room to explore. But a number of oddly-placed camera angles can lead to frustration; I kept finding myself switching between shots when Guybrush would leave a scene in one direction and enter the next in exactly the opposite. Some environments are troublesome to manoeuvre our hero in, and he tends to do a weird dance-like action when coming up against invisible walls – extremely un-pirate like.
As mouse input has been removed in favour of the keyboard, it can sometimes be difficult to get Guybrush to stand exactly where you need him to in order to highlight an object. This can be another cause of irritation since the SCUMM verbs have been replaced by a series of text options. On a positive note however, pressing a key enables the player to automatically leave an environment or bring up an overhead map; but I can’t help feeling like the gameplay would have been a bit more fluid if only LucasArts had stuck with the mouse.
The gameplay would be more fluid if players could only use a mouse.
The title contains many puzzles and, as Monkey Island fans have come to expect, they can seem a bit illogical at first. For example, what you need to do in order to tell a pair of twin parrots apart is somewhat random; but once you remember what was said by the barman at the Micro-Groggery, it all becomes clear and extremely inventive. More often than not clues are dropped by characters in this way and, if you immerse yourself in that familiar pirate humour, you’ll soon find your way out of any sticky situation.
Many fans will say that the hallmark aspect of the Monkey Island series is the insult sword-fighting, duels based on the wittiness of your slurs rather than the quality of your combat. It’s briefly touched upon during a round of insult arm-wrestling with Mr Cheese the navigator and in an unwinnable battle against Mandrill. But in the whole the much-loved mechanic has been succeeded by Monkey Kombat: a simian parody of Mortal Kombat (review coming soon), of course.
This sub-game is something like rock-paper-scissors, where players need to memorise retorts that consist of randomised compositions of the monkey words ‘ack’, ‘chee’, ‘eep’ and ‘oop’. During my research for this review I found that a lot of players criticised Escape from Monkey Island for this puzzle at the time of its release, but I have to admit that I actually quite enjoyed it. It’s unusual nowadays to come up against a challenge that actually requires you to get a pen and paper, and it’s something from adventure classics that I miss.
The graphics in the first two Monkey Island games were as realistic as was possible for the time, whereas The Curse of Monkey Island went for more cartoon-like visuals. As mentioned above, these have both been done away with and replaced by a 3D environment in Escape from Monkey Island; this decision wasn’t met with much positivity from fans, myself being among them. I disliked the graphics during my first playthrough and not much has changed since – give me an illustrated background and point-and-click controls any day.
The character models aren’t great and have aged quite badly.
The character models are jagged, with some being rendered a little uninteresting through lack of features. Various models even seem to be re-used; I was certain that one pirate in a late cutscene was the demolition man who appeared at the beginning, until I realised that he had a different voice. Although many critics praised the title for its graphics at the time of release, unfortunately the best thing I can say about them is that the curly-shaped clouds and plaid effect of Stan’s jacket are still with us.
And now for what’s probably the most important part of this review: an update on my ‘brush crush. After seeing the still dialogue scenes in The Secret of Monkey Island I had a huge fondness for Guybrush as a kid but then LucasArts shattered my childhood dreams by giving him a dodgy beard in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. He shaved off the bad facial hair in The Curse of Monkey Island but still wasn’t the tousle-haired buccaneer of my fantasies; and after playing Escape from Monkey Island I can officially say that my crush is over. Seriously, just take a look at the picture below.
My Guybrush crush is officially over.
Fortunately, the voice-acting is great and does a better job of bringing the characters to life than the graphics do. Dominic Armato is once again perfectly cast as Guybrush and instils our hero will lots of personality. My one small issue with the sound is the re-use of music which sometimes feels a little like laziness; in the previous games it was a delight to hear a new rendition of the main theme during the opening credits, but this instalment seems to recycle the same music used for The Curse of Monkey Island.
Reading through the above, it seems like I’m really critical of Escape from Monkey Island and didn’t actually enjoy playing the game. But that’s not the case: it definitely kept me amused over a week and I’d recommend it to adventure fans. Sadly however, it suffers as much from the pressure of being part of such a beloved series as it does from its own shortcomings – it’s somewhat overshadowed by the greatness of its predecessors.
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