Escape from Monkey Island

"An admirable try at cleverness winds up being an exercise in frustration"

The character models and backgrounds are truly beautiful, their expressive cartoony look fits perfectly with the freewheeling and slightly off-kilter spirit of the game. But the real standout features of Escape from Monkey Island are the one-two punch of the superb voice acting and the well written and funny story. I laughed out loud any number of times while playing this game, the absurd situations our hero Guybrush Threepwood find himself in and the witty patter of all the characters involved will have you crying with laughter.

I wish I could say that’s all that will bring a tear to your eye. Point and click adventure games have always been very heavy on the puzzles. It’s too bad that certain puzzles in this game are needlessly frustrating and completely unintuitive.

The game starts out wonderfully, the first island is filled with pleasingly bizarre puzzles whose solutions, while odd, make sense. But then you travel to Lucre Island. The only way to solve the puzzles on Lucre Island is to systematically try to combine every item in your inventory with every other item, multiple times and then attempt to use what’s left with every character and structure on the island. Either that or buy the book from Prima for $20.

Here’s just one example: when I need to get an address from a blind prosthetics salesman who lost the monkey that ran his filing system (you know, the filing system with all the addresses in it?) out I go to pound the pavement looking for the monkey, right? Wrong! You combine an empty bottle with some stagnant water, wood shaving, dead fish and a flower.

Huh?

The worst part is none of these puzzles would not have been huh?-inducing if someone somewhere made some sort of hint. They would have fit perfectly into the pleasantly brain-damaged atmosphere of the game if there had been any reason for you to combine these items other than you’ve already talked to everyone, you’ve already been everywhere, you’ve already done everything and you don’t know what else to do.

When I finally got Lucre Island behind me the pleasingly bizarre puzzles with the odd solutions that still made sense made a reappearance. Halle-freakin’-lujah! I was enjoying myself again, the throb in the vein in my temple actually subsided. So when the game crashed because I opened my inventory just as a pre-scripted event began my feelings were mixed. On the one hand I wanted to continue to play this entertaining game which I only got halfway through. On the other hand maybe the second half of the game was designed by the same dingbat who designed Lucre Island.

It’s important for me to stress that I think Monkey Island fans and point and click aficionados will probably eat this up with a spoon. I gave it a five out of ten simply because, when I was playing it, half the time I was having a blast and the other half I wanted to kill myself.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/19/02, Updated 10/19/02