In 2017 I reviewed the first two games of the Monkey Island saga, considered by many, the best game of the graphic adventure genre in the industry, which is a title that I agree 100%. Monkey Island laid the foundations of how future games of this genre would be made and although nowadays the mechanics of adventure games have changed a lot or video games of this style are no longer made, it still remains in the memory of many people all the adventures and funny moments we lived playing Monkey Island. Many years have passed since I did those reviews, they were in my first years writing reviews and after more than 3 years, again I will talk about one of the games of this great saga, which unfortunately, has not been a very well cared saga and many people consider this the last game of the saga, even though there are 5 games in total and the one I will talk about today is the 3rd one.
Today's Retro Review is about: The Curse Of Monkey Island.
After the strange ending of Monkey Island 2 in which we see Guybrush and Lechuck as children who are in an amusement park of a much more "current" time, and surprisingly reveal that they are "brothers", after this, the game shows us again the time corresponding to the game (the normal time where all the events of the game take place), Elaine mentions that "hopefully Guybrush has not fallen into a spell of Lechuck and" so ends the game. That is, the final scene of the game, Lechuck deceives Guybrush and even us as players, by making us believe that everything that happened in the game, was only a product of the imagination of two children, which for a moment left us all quite confused by that situation, but with Elaine's scene, we are also given to understand that everything is a trick of Lechuck. After this the game ends and is when the story of the 3rd game of the saga begins.
This one starts with Guybrush sailing in a bumper car in the middle of the ocean, referencing the ending scene of the previous game, so this makes it even more confusing (but maybe it's just part of the game's humor and a way of telling us not to take the story seriously). After sailing around for a while, Guybrush finds Lechuck and Elaine having a fight. Lechuck's pirates notice Guybrush and capture him, locking him in a room on the ship and thus beginning a new adventure of the most charismatic and funny pirate in the industry. A game that, again, is an adventure from start to finish, very funny, with the typical humor so characteristic of the first two games, with hilarious situations, strange, but above all very funny.
Graphically with respect to the previous two games, The Curse Of Monkey Island totally changes its graphic aspect, since the developers opted to use a graphic style more similar to that of a traditional animated film, that is to say, it has a similar style to the first Broken Sword games, but still maintaining its charisma and great personality. It's like watching an interactive animated movie, the animations look great even today and when you implement a graphic style with as much quality as this game or the first Broken Sword, they are practically anteportal games, many years may pass but they will still look great.
Having this new graphic style, The Curse Of Monkey Island "modernizes" the old character designs and even some places we visited in previous games (without taking into account the special editions of the first two games which have a new graphic style). Because of this change, there is now much more detail in the scenarios, many more objects and secrets to see and despite this big change from the first two games, you can still perceive that this is a game of the Monkey Island saga. It maintains its great colorful scenery and characters, as well as its great sense of humor, because now the designs of the characters have higher quality graphics (being these, as I said before, practically an animated cartoon), so they have more expressiveness to the situations they are living throughout the game, besides having better set of animations and movements. The cinematics also look good and it is another addition to the great sense of humor that this saga has.
In sound section is... the first two games have one of the most iconic soundtracks of video games without any doubt and in this third part of the Monkey Island saga, who was in charge of sound section is the same composer of the first two games, therefore, logically and obviously it was going to be just as spectacular. With new melodies and some old but remastered, The Curse Of Monkey Island is just as spectacular as the two previous games and listening to some of the music of the previous games, but composed entirely from 0 and orchestrally is a marvel. I have little to say about the soundtrack of this game, because it is simply a work of art. Similarly, the sound effects that accompany us throughout the adventure, play a very important role in the ambience of the scenarios and the expressiveness of the characters, plus in terms of voice acting of the characters are great, both in English and Spanish actors did a great job acting, being able to adequately interpret, according to their personalities and characteristics to the characters of the game.
In terms of gameplay I am not going to explain much, since The Curse Of Monkey Island is still a game of the genre "adventure game" quite conventional, which consists of the classic "point and click", both to move around the stage, as to interact with objects or other characters. But unlike the other games, they totally changed the game system to a much more updated one, that is, previously to perform any action such as: talk, use, take, look, among other actions, the game consisted of an interface with each of these actions, which we should choose and select where to use, in an object or character, in this way, our main character, can perform the chosen action, it was an old system and a fairly classic one that many games of this style used. In the case of The Curse Of Monkey Island they changed to a much more simplified system, since it is only enough to click on the character or object and in this way a small menu opens where we can choose the desired action, much more "minimalist" and visually looks better.
As in the previous games, exploring and interacting with both the characters and the objects on the stage is of great importance to solve the puzzles that we will find in the adventure, in the same way, the objects that we find and store in our inventory, we must think very well how to use them in our environment, and we can even combine certain objects to use them at certain times or places. It is of great importance to "experiment" with many things to be able to solve a problem, since this game has a relatively high level of difficulty at certain times.
In short, The Curse Of Monkey Island is a spectacular game from start to finish, I liked it just like the first games and playing it was like going back in time. For many people, this is considered as the last game of the saga even though there are two other games, but this is the last game in which the main creator of the first two games worked. Maybe I will play the next two Monkey Island games, but in some time.