I'll paste in what I wrote back when Dan and I played a bit of it shortly after release, with a few edits. This all still stands for me, unfortunately:
First the fairground thing - so all the games so far have been Guybrush's kid play-acting his own versions of his stories? And he hangs out with a kid who happens to be called Chucky? And then they just did a couple of things at the end that didn't really make any sense but would have acted well as a good cliffhanger for a video game? And actually it all looking like modern day (down to Chucky's heavy metal t-shirt) was misleading and this is still pirate times? And when Guybrush Jr saw his parents in the dream sequence in Revenge, he made them two randos from the park he'd seen earlier? And Chucky was, what, just watching Guybrush Jr play-act on his own for 95% of the time then stepping in for two minutes once an hour? But... this thing we're playing now is real? Or maybe not for all I know? Also, the fairground reveal and the 'previously on' scrapbook really clash - so Guybrush definitely did the stuff in the book? So he definitely pulled LeChuck's leg off with the voodoo doll? But we just will now never get to know how that story actually ended. Or maybe that is Guybrush Jr playing at being Guybrush Sr looking through an imaginary scrapbook about imaginary adventures and talking out loud about them. Maybe Guybrush Sr is actually an accountant and all the pirate stuff is stories he's wholly made up for his kids. Who knows, now? Very unsatisfying and messy and frankly a total cop-out. (Maybe they'll reveal more stuff later that turns it all around but doing a shit twist in order to set up a good twist later isn't the best idea.)
Regardless of whether it all technically makes sense somehow, I'm not really paying attention to the game, because I'm trying to juggle all this in my head. It's just a very inelegant way to handle it all and especially to start a game.
More general stuff. It's a very boring start even apart from the canon-wrangling - a drawn out tutorial that is inconsequential to the story, then Melee Island again except it's sliiiightly diiiifferent! Plus the Princess Bride 'kid interrupts adult telling the story' stuff is pretty tired now. I still don't like the art, or the animation. Guybrush looks like an anorexic homeless person with a dicknose, and the cheap animation makes everyone looks like they've got Parkinson's. It's just not funny so far. I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to do Pun Swordfighting, which if they do is just the laziest internet-addled shit ever. And that dated horse armour reference they did as promotion which actually infected the game was terrible. It's got a To Do list (with pop-ups) and 'new item' exclamation mark icons, and a Hint Guide (which they waste the Voodoo Lady's intro scene on giving to you and which glows and shakes in your inventory unlike any other item, as if encouraging you to just give up on playing the game properly) and some sort of collectibles thing, which UGH. The context-sensitive hover text is really irritating and pointless, and Guybrush on the map is now an icon bouncing around rather than actual Guybrush walking across an island.
The tutorial was ridiculously long and had zero subtlety, plus it feels really weird for an MI game to open with something like that anyway. Newcomers could just look at a controls screen or something. Along with the flat, child's doodle art style and the whole 'this is a kid just making shit up' thing being made completely explicit from the jump, the whole thing feels really patronising and cutesy and fake. Just completely the wrong mood for a Monkey Island game. Even if you take the twist ending of MI2 at face value, it's still done in a creepy way and it doesn't undo the tone of the first two games.
So, yeah, not a fan of this at all so far, and it's really weird to see Gilbert go from 'purposefully retro, poking at the player's patience in just the right way' in TP to this smoothed out collection of bells and whistles.
Hopefully as I go on, more stuff will appeal to me and I'll be able to stop thinking about the bumpy start.
God, Dan mentioned this at the time, but I'd forgotten how hand-holdy these cuts back to storyteller Guybrush are. Explaining very basic concepts that you just heard literally ten seconds earlier, and reassuring you that doing adventure game puzzles isn't boring because it's leading to story beats. It's a Monkey Island game that is too caught up in its own lore and yet wants to be accessible to someone who's never played an adventure game before.
When I opened the game up again, I was like 'hmmm, actually this art isn't half as bad as I remembered from yesterday, it looks sorta nice', and then as soon as I walked somewhere and all the movement kicked in, it looked horrible again. It's the paper-puppets aesthetic, the characters just gliding through the world and printing on top of stuff they shouldn't, and the way everything is constantly in motion, not just the weird head shaking but the chandeliers violently swinging, the bouncing pot on the throbbing stove. It all feels like a cheap YouTube under-4s animation, or a very cheap knock off of Broken Age. They also put a bunch of background animation in, which I'd normally appreciate, but it's so in your face here it can sometimes feel like the same kind of over-compensation as the head warping.
A lot of the time you have to examine stuff to unlock the interact option, sometimes you don't get an examine option at all, and when trying to use your inventory on stuff you get a big red no entry icon for most of it so you can't try anything out and get hints. It makes it all feel more on rails. Even a flat 'that doesn't work' response, while in effect the same as a pre-emptive no entry, makes you feel more involved (and also makes it less tempting to brute force stuff by just sweeping your inventory over all the hotspots until you get a sentence line).
Storywise, there's a recurring motif of Guybrush looking at broken down relics from the past and reminiscing on old times. Like, the sentence line is sometimes explicitly stuff like "remember happier times" while looking at Melee island stuff. So I think Gilbert is trying to do an Unforgiven style narrative here, with older Guybrush coming back to his old haunts and finding everything falling apart, taken over by more ruthlessly capitalist and cynical tastes, with an allegorical layer about his return to the series. This is really interesting and I wish he'd leaned into this rather than the meta stuff. Like, give Guybrush grey hair and a shaggy beard, make it the next step from MI2, have him and LeChuck get back on track to the secret of Monkey Island after getting distracted by other weird silly adventures. Frankly, lean a bit more into the 'this is how you should have done an MI3' thing that a lot of fans wanted (and that he himself blogged about many years earlier). But if this is what he's reaching for, it's massively compromised by the presentation (art style tone, UI etc). Also, it's a shame that Escape already did the return to Melee and the capitalist modernising thing, it has (had?) a lot more potential resonance here.
Finished. It got a little more complicated towards the end, with five keys to collect, but I basically made my way through without having to stop to think, which is a weird experience for a Monkey Island game. Probably the paucity of verbs and dialogue trees played a big part in this. The only times I ever really slowed down were when I had to re-examine something in my inventory and when I missed a pathway because it blended in with the background.
Storywise, it's a very bog-standard Monkey Island set-up, going to Melee Island, LeChuck's ship and a few other island, taking part in contests and cheating to win, tracking down five of the same item, racing against LeChuck, all the same characters again.
And so, the ending. I've been posting spoilers all through this thread, but just a last warning: spoilers! So, just before the final section, there's a little conversation with Elaine where she lists some of the bad things you've done through the game. There have been multiple cutscenes setting this up where she finds out about the path of destruction you've been leaving behind you. Then she lists them and asks whether it was worth it just to chase down this secret, and Guybrush says he was just solving puzzles, there was no other way, to which she replies "wasn't there?" (No. No there wasn't.) And that's it. Loads of narrative weight all for this one sub-Bioshock 'gotcha' moment, the kind of clever clever video game post-modernism that we poke fun at in LOTCG with Ben's reaction to the Denial level. I have no idea what Gilbert and Grossman are trying to say here - are they questioning our willingness to do bad things via Guybrush, or the fanbase's fixation on "The Secret", or whether they should have bothered making this game? It's also a little hard to dissect it precisely, because they hedge their bets by giving Guybrush multiple reply options.
So, that over with and forgotten, you get through the last few puzzles. LeChuck has the secret of Monkey Island in a big chest, says it must be opened in the bowels of Monkey Island, and has gone through the last door to do that. So you solve the puzzle, walk through, and... you exit through the same "employees only" Melee Island door that you did in Monkey Island 2. You're back on the high street but everything is fake, it's a theme park that Stan maintains and regularly creates different stories for. Basically, it's an escape room/LARP type set up, that Guybrush occasionally plays in. Then it cuts back to Guybrush Jr complaining about the ending and demanding to know what the secret is, the player is given various options, and then Elaine heads off with Guybrush Jr and Guybrush is left sitting on the bench relaxing. It's all incredibly smug and meaningless and so fucking lazy. It's just the same 'it's all a story' thing from MI2 (and Thimbleweed Park) but with more muddled layers thrown on top. The message seems to be 'you played a fun game, right? Who cares what the ending of the story is, it's all fake anyway!' Which I find to be an incredibly flawed and uninteresting one.
G&G add a final note to the player at the end of the 'previously on' (bit annoying to have to click through to get to, but whatever), where they talk about how the game addressed Gilbert's career being largely defined by this one thing, and how successful they can be at revisiting the glory days as older people. But... the game doesn't really grapple with those themes in any meaningful way. It just replays some old hits, has a character ask "is it worth it" and then wraps up with a shrug. If the secret is so unimportant, why spend the whole story on it? Why not get it and Monkey Island out of the way early and do something new and exciting with the rest of the game?
A shallow ending to a shallow game.
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