Escape From Monkey Island (2000)

First impressions:

Wow, I'd forgotten how bad the presentation of this game is, with a title sequence made up of dissolves between screengrabs, and chapter cards with idling 3D models slapped onto a scroll png. There's no way around it, it's just half-arsed. The overall art looks better than Gabriel Knight 3, but much worse than Grim Fandango or Curse Of Monkey Island. And the tone has now completely switched to Saturday morning cartoon mode. Guybrush is mugging to camera, the pirate crews are squeaky-clean and identical except for the colour of their sweater stripes, it's all cutesy banter. But even taking it on its own merits, it's all rather soulless and bland.

Have played a bit more. The writing is fairly bad. The jokes are mostly puns, aged references (Forrest Gump, anyone?) or Guybrush doing a Barry White voice while hitting on women, and it just doesn't feel like an MI game a lot of the time. It's all so overwritten as well. I'm on Lucre Island and every single NPC tells you about this one plot point - about all the pirates leaving or the tourists taking over or something - so you end up hearing it twenty times, it's infuriating. 

"Say, why's your shop so empty?" ... "Oh, it's because Ozzie Mandrill bought all the property and etc etc"

"How's the perfume business?"... "Pretty bad since Ozzie Mandrill etc etc"

Over and fucking over. Same with Pegnose Pete - he lives in the Mists Of Time and his nose got eaten by a duck, I am now FULLY aware.

Also, some shitty puzzles. You have to beat a guy at insult arm-wrestling (groan - why do all these non-Gilbert sequels put such franchise weight on this one tiny aspect of the first game?), and the solution is... just keep selecting options until you randomly win. The prostheses seller will give you some fake skin to cover a manhole to use as a trampoline, if you fill in his story with the names from the back of the manhole cover - makes zero sense and you have no reason to guess at it. You have to recreate the smell of a handkerchief, but examining it doesn't tell you the smell, you have to get it out and use it five times to get all the different vague and overlapping hints.

I'm having to check a walkthrough for the puzzle about getting the chess clock - I remember this one stumps me every time! I'm not sure if I'll bother to play this game the whole way through, tbh. I've played it a few times before and I don't like it. It's not satisfying like replaying DOTT for the millionth time or interesting like playing The Dig for the second or third time.

Ugggh, okay, the solution to the chess pirates is to get them both distracted at the same time or something? Okay yeah I can't be bothered with this one anymore. I know a lot of people say that this is not a great MI game but it's a solid adventure game, but I disagree. It's the kind of run-of-the-mill, nice enough presentation and lots of content but crappy puzzles and imprecise writing adventure game that gives the genre a bad name.

Rating: Bad