We’ve finally seen Return to Monkey Island in action: Looks great, full of laughs

SEATTLE—Longtime game designer Ron Gilbert has repeatedly suggested that a sequel to his beloved Monkey Island series would arrive how fans want it: unspoiled. It's a major reason why the point-and-click adventure's pre-release period has been devoid of gameplay footage or other major giveaways of what to expect, lest any of its puzzles or jokes be ruined. As the long-awaited Return to Monkey Island approaches its September 19 release date, then, interested fans will have to tide themselves over with the bones Gilbert and his collaborator Dave Grossman threw my way at this weekend's PAX West. After I entered their meeting room and sheathed my camera, the pair turned on an external display, picked up a computer mouse, and began goading hero Guybrush Threepwood around the new game's environs. You might be jealous, but I would argue that your comparable ignorance about how the game looks and sounds is a happier place to be until September 19. My patience for this game's release has now dwindled.

“Rediscovering that about your past self is really interesting”

Editor's note: This article is careful not to spoil a single puzzle, joke, or unannounced character reveal. One plot-specific reveal, which Gilbert and Grossman were happy to announce, lands near the end of the article. "Wanna do 'Monocle'? Wanna do 'Jail'?" Gilbert, sitting next to Grossman, rattles off a few vague terms while picking through a debug menu on a near-final macOS build of the game. After deciding where to take me in gameplay, Grossman seems caught off guard: "Oh!" he blurts. "Cut scene happening." I ask if everything is fine, to which Gilbert replies, "It's a little spoiler-ish." The scene in question is unsurprising as far as Monkey Island lore goes, but I'll leave its details mum for now, except to say: It got me laughing, and it confirmed my confidence in the game's art direction. The scene, like the rest of the game, includes accurately mapped lip sync for its fully voiced dialogue, and its hand-drawn characters are appropriately rigged to look like detailed paper cutouts being tugged every which way. Eyes bulge, faces distort, and arms and hands emote in a manner that preserves the sequel's "ripped from a picture book" aesthetic without resembling a dated Adobe Flash animation project. Instead, the conversation sequences I saw fondly recalled some of my favorite '90s children's books, especially the works of Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs) as if they'd been animated by devoted fans of the source material. It didn't hurt that the scene in question embraces the series' classic sense of humor. This scene toys with the classic archetype of a bad guy steering into folly, complete with henchmen who suggest "safer" business decisions that happen to be illegal and brutal—then campily telegraphs to players the exact path they will take to ruin someone's day. This 90-second exchange instantly put me at ease as a classic Monkey Island fan: as if I'd put on a comfortable, well-worn peg leg after all these years. In checking with Gilbert and Grossman about the sequel's sense of humor, the duo confirmed that they replayed the series' classic games before beginning work on the newest sequel—and Gilbert says a mass game-playing revisit of his old titles is standard practice before he starts any new game project. As they've previously suggested, the new game pulls characters and ideas from 1997's Curse of Monkey Island (which neither worked on), while Grossman admits that the Starz historical-fiction series Black Sails also influenced the duo: "It's not written by humorists at all, but there are a lot of interesting ideas." In describing his habit of replaying old games before making new ones, Gilbert describes "rediscovering that feeling of, 'oh, I once thought this,' or, 'this is the way I wrote about this stuff.' Rediscovering that about your past self is really interesting, yet also, you know, we aren't the same people anymore. So we're not going to just pretend like we made this game in 1993. We're going to use everything we've learned as designers, writers, and people, and put all that into the new game." To this point, the duo emphasized "empathy" with how players encounter and figure out puzzles, compared to the sometimes brutal difficulty walls of the original games.

Growing from a single pixel to many, many more

From there, Gilbert took control of Threepwood and guided him through a simple early puzzle, which connected the dots of characters old and new that he'd encountered to unlock a door. The dry humor throughout this basic quest had me riveted, so much so that I was disappointed when Gilbert skipped any of the four to six dialogue choices in a conversation. One fakeout saw Threepwood attempt a stealthy move in a store, only to have the shopkeeper notice and say the whole episode was fine—and it ended with a subtle joke that made clear how terrible this person is at business. This was followed by a demonstration of one character in a town offering a seemingly endless stream of generic adventure-game advice tidbits, delivered with stone-faced seriousness that had me chuckling. Speaking of help: Return to Monkey Island's design duo was not ready to unveil the game's built-in hint book, which, as they've previously discussed, has been created in response to how people play adventure games in the 2020s. "These days, if people get stuck on a puzzle, they don't puzzle it over for a month and talk to all of their friends," Gilbert says. "They just go to Google and they instantly find the answer. In the case of Thimbleweed Park, often, the [online] answer was wrong!" I've since gotten the duo to clarify that Return to Monkey Island's built-in hints are not full of jokes, gags, or series references. In other words: If you want to be a classic adventure-gaming pro and get the most out of the game, you can ignore the hint book. (Also, if you're wondering, the system is something you stumble upon during the game and then add to your inventory.)

My agonizingly brief time watching the game included both callbacks and direct meetings with classic characters, along with a couple of tasteful appropriations of modern terminology to sell a few jokes that feel timeless. On a graphical basis, the demonstration revealed a new dynamic lighting system, which casts shadows and glowing effects onto characters as they walk by light sources, and Gilbert is happy that the game's current engine can access a computer or console's GPU. "We were doing a lot of tricks back in the [LucasArts] day of only updating the little piece that actually changed when things change," Gilbert says. "Now, we don't care. We just slam every single frame with pixels. The entire screen, all the layers to the screen." This also means the game includes a full particle-simulation system, though I didn't see this in action. In addition to launching on Nintendo Switch, Return to Monkey Island will debut on Windows PCs and Mac. I took the opportunity to nudge Gilbert and Grossman about a possible Linux port, to which Gilbert replied, "Don't quote me," before balancing his desire to port the game to Linux with the development difficulties that may be associated with that port. (Here's to hoping the handy Steam Proton framework made by Valve plays nicely with Return to Monkey Island either at launch or soon after.) I got to see the new game's map interface—which Gilbert describes as somewhere between a "satellite view" and a hand-drawn map—though since my demo took place very early in the campaign, that meant most of its details were blacked out. Gilbert pointed to the smaller-yet-detailed Threepwood avatar that moved from zone to zone on this map and remarked, "I think he was a single pixel" in the original games' map interfaces.

More context on the game’s development and a potential spoiler for longtime fans

For this final portion, I think it's arguably best to let Gilbert and Grossman's commentary speak for itself. Below is an edited transcript of one portion of our conversation. Ars Technica: How much can you tell us about how the game begins? Ron Gilbert: Guybrush has returned to Mêlée Island because... his unfinished business in the story is that he never found the actual secret of Monkey Island. And he really wants to actually find the secret. So he's decided to mount a voyage back to Monkey Island, and he's back on Mêlée to try to, you know, hire a crew, get a ship, and all these things he did in the first game. But when he arrives, he finds that things have changed quite a bit since he was last here. AT: How long has it been? RG: I'm not sure I want to say yet. Because while the game starts right after Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, things get really bizarre at that point, and so I don't really want to kind of go into that level of stuff. AT: How long has this idea of having players try to discover the secret been in your mind? RG: I think that's a relatively new idea. The Secret of Monkey Island was the title of the first game, but we never really explored the title literally. At one moment [in development], there was a huge kind of a backstory, and there was actually a secret. As we started developing the game, though, that just kind of fell away, and we really just stopped paying attention to it. Going back to it, it is a piece of unfinished business for a lot of players, you know. It's called The Secret of Monkey Island. What's the damned secret?! It’s also, for us, interesting to revisit and go, you know, we're actually going to tell people what the secret of Monkey Island is in this game.

AT: As a creator and writer, is that actually an interesting question to answer? RG: Yeah, it is. AT: What's changed to make that so? RG: It wasn't a priority. Not because it wasn't interesting. It's just other things became higher priorities as we told the story, and we stopped. In this case, enough years have passed, and enough people have asked the question that it felt like... we did have a conversation early on in the [Return to Monkey Island] design phase about, are we going to reveal the secret? In some of the early designs, it was, Guybrush doesn't find the secret. But that just felt hollow at some point. If we're gonna do the thing, he needs to truly find the secret. The real secret, as it was envisioned, you know, back in 1990. So that became a very interesting creative thing to do, is to go, how are we going to do that? AT: So you've known the secret all along, then. RG: Yep. AT: Have you told anyone this? I think I missed this memo. RG: Very few people.

“I want that stuff in my life for the next couple of years”

AT: David, what's your take on coming back to this series and reuniting with Ron? David Grossman: Coming together and agreeing is not hard. I just went to Ron’s house one day. We both said, let's talk about what the game should be about, the themes, where's Guybrush at, and what's gonna happen to him? And we had surprisingly many of the same ideas. I think a lot of it dropped out of, I mean, you're talking about the secret and how we ignored it for a long time, but the audience made it necessary for us to make a game about that. In a way, this, for us, is a way to go back and address some unfinished business, which is that sort of dangling thread from the end of Monkey 2. It was natural for us to make a game about Guybrush himself, going back and trying to address unfinished business, which is exactly where this starts, and then it leads from there. AT: At a top level, what got you excited to join this project? Just being back in the world of Monkey Island, or were there specific things that you missed creating in this universe? DG: For me, all Ron had to say was, 'You want to make another Monkey Island game?' And I was like, [voice raises optimistically] 'Yeah, you know, I do!' The world is very special and friendly. It's like an old friend of mine. It's got a good sense of humor, but, you know, kind of talks to me about things that matter. I want all that stuff in my life for the next couple years. Let’s do it. AT: You're both mentioning a goal of answering a question that fans had been asking about, but how do you balance fan expectations with the concept of putting on blinders and making the kind of game you want to make? RG: Fan service can be a really dangerous thing, because if you're just doing fan service, things feel very hollow. You know, I've seen movies, and I won’t mention names, but I see movies which are clearly just fan service movies. They're hollow, you know, because they're just grabbing things of nostalgia, going: 'Hey, remember this guy? Remember this thing?' Our main goal here was to tell the story we want to tell, and when there are things that people really love about those games, when they naturally fit into what we're doing, then they really belong there. All of our recurring characters, they're not there just because, oh, let's meet the Lookout again, let's meet Stan again, let's meet whoever again. They're there because the story needs them there. DG: We put in a few select references to in-jokes, but it's mostly not doing that. The point of the game isn't nostalgia. The point is to make a new game with the same feel and the same heart. Return to Monkey Island launches on September 19 on Windows PC, macOS, and Nintendo Switch.