malvasia bianca

I never played any of the original Monkey Island games. I played lots of text adventures growing up, but I wasn’t playing games much during the heyday of graphical adventures, and so I basically missed that entire side of the genre. Over the years since then, though, I’ve heard people I respect bring up the Monkey Island games periodically, enough that I vaguely felt that not having played those was a gap in my background; but they never actually made it to the top of my stack.

When Return to Monkey Island came out, I heard several people say quite positive things about in on podcasts. So I figured that it was time to fill in that gap; I’d try the newest game, and if I liked it enough, maybe I’d go back and play the earlier games?

I liked Return to Monkey Island. It was quite well done, it kept me entertained, I didn’t get stuck. But also, it didn’t grab me? I’m honestly not sure what was going on there: was it too targeted at fans of the series, is the genre just not for me (which, if so, makes me wonder if I would have liked the genre in the 90s), do I like the genre okay but mostly when it’s telling a different type of story, do I just have different gaming tastes from the Triple Click folks and I should stop paying attenion to their game recommendations?

If I had to guess, probably bits of each of those. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret having played the game! I enjoyed my time with it, and I also appreciated that it didn’t overstay its welcome. But I also don’t have much to say about it…