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I've taken the liberty of writing out text for a video interview with Ron that was done by Rock, Paper Shotgun but was locked by a paywall. There's some further detail of the hint system and confirmation of how it works as a mechanic within the fantasy of the game world as well as hints to what the story is (he's still vague enough about it but it's a great tease) So Ron, what has it been like for you returning to this world? It's been a lot of fun! It's been 30 years since I really immersed myself in that world and it's a lot of fun to sort of get back to it. I was a little worried at the beginning about what that was going to be like, but it is just like a comfortable glove at some point, you know when I started working on it with Dave, we just fell into it so quickly. Awesome! So what can you tell us about the story? Well, the story is...we kinda call it unfinished business. You know Guybrush, in the first game even though it's called The Secret of Monkey Island, he never actually found the secret, so this game is really about him finding the real secret to Monkey Island, and I think it's also unfinished business for Dave and me as designers, because we never disclosed what the secret was, and you know Monkey Island 2 ended on this bizarre cliffhanger, so for us it's unfinished business and for Guybrush it's unfinished business. Yeah we were talking before about this huge cliffhanger at the end of 2, so where in the Monkey Island timeline does this land? So the game starts right after Monkey Island 2 ends...and then it just gets bizarre from there. Can you explain what kind of bizarre things we're gonna see? No, you'll have to buy the game (laughs) I love that! So one thing that was talked about on the panel was this idea of puzzle creation and adventure games are known for their challenging puzzles. Will Return to Monkey Island follow in its predecessor's footsteps, or what kind of puzzles are we gonna see, what should we expect? Well it's definitely a point and click game. There's a type of puzzle that really inhabits a point and click adventure, so we're definitely doing that. I think that times have changed, players have changed, we're different people, we've changed, and I think adventure games need to change with that. And it's not about making thongs simpler, but I think it's how you design puzzles. You need to be a bit clearer about things with people, and there are people who don't know point and click, don't know Monkey Island, and you need to kinda ease people into that stuff. One thing we've added to the game is a hintbook, so if you are stuck you can look at the hintbook. I mean these days, when you get stuck on a puzzle, you don't puzzle theough it for a month and talk to your friends about it, you just run to Google. We didn't want people to leave our game to do that, so we added a hintbook, and it's part of the fantasy of the game, it's actually a physical object that Guybrush has in his inventory. And you have to go get the hintbook, it's not something that's just given to you. So we hope that people who do want hints use our hint system, because we can be very clever about the hints, we know where you are and what things you've tried, so we can give you hints that are very tailored to the specific issue that you have. As someone who's had a relationship with Monkey Island for so long, how has your approach changed from the older games to the new one? What's different? I think creatively, design and story-wise, not much has changed at all. We start with a high concept for the thing, down to the individual parts of the game, then below that the character arcs and below that the puzzles. We've always done that with games and I don't think that part has really changed.

Guybrush is still going to be a fancy pants then 🤣 Thanks so much for typing all of that out OzzieMonkey! 🙂

Pretty sure they will not substitute that question mark with an exclamation point. I think they'll just change the question mark's font. 🦊

Considering the Voodoo Lady is a character who can see the future (and might have influence over it if you go with Tales' interpretation), it would make total sense for her to have an item that can help Guybrush even long after he's left the island she's on. I imagine that even if you have to go and get the hintbook, there probably isn't a whole puzzle chain dedicated to getting it, as it would be truly madenning to get stuck getting hints for another puzzle you're stuck on 😂

Man... I know Ron mentioned this before, but just reading that sentence sent shivers down my spine! I can't believe that we're picking up right from the ending of MI2 - I never thought we'd get a clear(er?) explanation of that ending!

I really love how Ron is using the word "bizarre" to describe the story of the game. It makes me think of MI2's ending. I'm hyped!

I really do feel like bumbling from problem to problem of his own making is peak guybrush, and so presumably they won't be making him TOO competent. I like how in the latest clip nobody knows or cares who he is. I think that's as it should be. No matter how much he achieves on paper, everyone sees him as at best irrelevant, and at worst an annoyance who gets in the way. Though I like the character of Morgan LeFlay, on my last play of Tales I wasn't that enamoured with the idea of a Guybrush fan. It helped that later on she discovers her idea of Guybrush was severely distorted, but still I feel like Guybrush doesn't quite work if he truly becomes a legend. The only people who really consistently care he exists are Elaine and LeChuck... and perhaps the Voodoo Lady.

Here's your Monkey Island nod: https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1561052724346515457?t=_BWMtSC3l5S4F49fsKyBMg&s=19

It certainly gives the game a bit of a cinematic vibe. I hope they're also doing closeups of Guybrush once in a while (which would be notably different from TSoMI). I won't try to find that interview again, but at one point in the last months Ron said that he loves how they've put a team together where everybody has some input and they can rather spontaneously insert a wacky idea somebody has at any point in the game creation process (heavily paraphrasing, but I think that was the gist). Pretty sure you won't have to worry, these nooks and crannies and bells and whistles will be there, and not just in fourth wall breaking stuff that we won't live to see missing in any Ron Gilbert game. 😉 It's become so customary to self-reference, comment on, jump to the meta level, to lament the downfall of adventure games. As I said above, we'll have to expect certain in-jokes as Ron will not do without, but I don't think that is what's teased at here. Return is probably not a game about the personal lives and careers of Dave and Ron, it may just allow the analogy. In the same vein, the new pirate leaders could symbolize the game industry if you wish to interpret it that way, no problem. If we're going for the kind of analogy that high literature would give us, it could be overt AF but would never be spelled out for us, but it also wouldn't be to the detriment of the storytelling. Let's attempt to interpret the new pirate leaders as "the gaming industry" for a moment, because I think we're running into some really interesting roadblocks. So let's assume Guybrush wants to get his game, I mean expedition, financed. He turns to the people who once were his patrons (say, an analogy for the LucasArts of old). But those were anything but perfect patrons. They were just higher ups who looked for some doofus that made the work for them, handing out honorary titles in return. They were just leeching of of Guybrush! So he presents this expedition to the new pirate leaders, asking for substantial amounts of money to finance it. The new pirate leaders are not interested, because Guybrush is trying to do exactly the same game/raid he did 30 years ago. He wants to go to Monkey Island AGAIN (= make a point & click adventure game). The new pirate leaders' rejection, therefore, is just, because Guybrush/the game idea is essentially completely unoriginal. At the same time the new pirate leaders will, without a second thought, finance the 15th expedition to the final fartasy fairgrounds, so at the very least there's some bigotry involved. Well, wouldn't that be bizarre.

A thought occurs. It’s established in secret that the story would have resolved quicker and cleaner if guybrush wasn’t in the game at all. In mi2 guybrush spends 90% of the game looking for a map the he doesn’t end up needing and in doing so brings lechuck back to life and never defeats him. In curse guybrush does save the day but the day only needs saving because he upgrades lechuck and curses elaine right at the start. Tales is the same. He cures the pox but he’s the one who unleshed it. Escape is the only game in which guybrush is truely and effectively heroic. The rest of the series has him stumbling around causing problems and occasionally resolving them. With that in mind does anyone really believe guybrush is going to be able to fix melee island and discover the secret of monkey island? Or is he just going to unleash kraken lechuck and get everyone eaten in the first 10 minutes.

‽

I would have liked to do that but Noah made it impossible.

I have a lot of faith in Ron and Dave. However... Its better to expect less and get more than to expect more and get less. I want MI1+2 level greatness But I'm expecting a game better than Escape... hopefully on par or even better than Curse But i must say that Thimbleweed Park is one of my favourite modern point and click games. For me it captures alot of the magic of mi1 and 2.

Funny thing is: Curse consistently wins on reddit polls. I think the "pixel era" vote gets split between Secret and Revenge.

"featured in Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark" 🤮

I'll bet my left kidney it won't see higher scores than mid-seventies to mid-eighties from mainstream media. Left. Kidney.

I totally respect people's desire not to want spoilers. But I also think a few things: Firstly I think everyone would agree different people have a different relationship with spoilers and I don't think it makes sense to assume what is true for one person about them is also true for everyone else. I also think attitudes to spoilers have changed a bit over the years to the point that I feel like if I, personally, treated spoilers with the same level of aversion that some people do, then it would ruin a different pleasure for me - that is to say, the pleasure of anticipating something through the slow drip of information. I like this bit - obviously I don't want to know the whole story, all the twists, all the jokes, and I'm looking forward to meeting characters, visiting locations, hearing music and solving puzzles for the first time when I play the game. But I... basically trust that Ron and team also don't want to reveal anything they believe is best experienced fresh in the game for the first time. So I don't feel like I want to cut myself off. I enjoy the bit where we get to analyse every shot, guess at what it means, speculate on stuff. It's always been part of the fun for me. I did it for CMI, EMI, Tales. If I tried to shut my eyes and close my ears, I might, possibly, be improving my first time experience of whatever 60 seconds of game I refuse to watch, or I might not see something about the themes of the game that Dave mentions in an interview, but I'd also simultaneously be denying myself the joy of speculation, that drip of information that heightens my anticipation. I only get to play the game for the first time once, but I also only get to anticipate the release once too - and I can't replay my anticipation. I do think that some movie trailers do a pretty poor job of holding stuff back in a way that could lessen enjoyment. But as far as ReMI goes, if you'd told me know I could erase my Monkey Island related memories of the last 6 months and so play the game as if completely unseen, I think I'd still say no, because that would mean erasing all the fun I've had wondering about what will happen, hanging on Ron and Dave's every tweet, pausing the trailer every half second to get a closer look. I mean... I THINK we've had fun... right?

I'm actually more excited for this now than I was when this game was a hypothetical and we all thought it would erase the last 3 games from canon. Now that we know that's not exactly the case, I'm really curious about what solution Ron and Dave have come up with to start at the end of 2 but also after Tales somehow, because it sounds like it's going to be more complicated than a simple timeskip.

Wouldn’t be the SCUMM Bar without closeups.

As for NYT vs. Mojo: Mojole changes at midnight server time; NYT at midnight client time (aka your time). I'm glad they're finding inspiration in the frankly superior -le.

Hi all, has been an extremely busy month at my end and haven't had time to post about the newest developments of ReMI! Will just do a rundown: - September 19th! Amazing! Congrats to all who predicted correctly. Logical deduction wins again! - Jess Harnell as LeChuck... honestly isn't really doing it for me, but I think I can get used to it. Harnell is an fantastic talent and is excellent at comedic acting in particular, but Boen... his deep, gravelly voice just naturally lent itself to LeChuck, and he had the perfect blend of humour and dread that the character needed. As far as perfect casting goes, across any media, he's well up there for me. From the very small amount we've seen so far, this LeChuck just seems so... feeble by comparison. Where Boen felt natural, this feels like a performance, and I don't buy him as a threat yet. Forget the artstyle, I thought *THIS* would be the main reason for backlash if anything, but most people seem to be fine with it. Like I said, I think I'll get used to it over the course of the game, but I just can't help wishing that we could've got Earl back one last time, just to complete the ensemble if anything. - BUT... Jess Harnell being in the game means that we'll almost certainly have him back as the storekeeper too. Same with Rob Paulsen, now that we've seen Bob on LeChuck's ship. - Neil Ross is back as Wally! Excellent! It really looks like they've made an effort to keep the cast consistent from the rest of the series. I think that just leaves Otis now in terms of if the "main" returning characters have their returning actors. (It occurs to me that we haven't seen Meathook yet. Or Smirk. Wonder if they're still around being on Melee and all.) With both Ross and Delk, however, I can definitely hear the age in their voices compared to the older games, but of course, that's unavoidable, and I'd never consider recasting. (Also, does it bother anyone else that Murray doesn't make the "teeth-chattering" noise when he speaks? It was in all of the other games, so it feels strange that it's missing here.) - Glad that we have Gavin Hammond as Stan back. Originally, I was thinking it would be better for consistency to have Pinney from MI1/2, but if the majority of the game does take place after Tales, as we're predicting, then him sounding as he did in Tales may be the best option. He was probably also the best blend of all of the elements of Stan for me, though I do really like Pinney as well. - The interface looks amazing. I *love* what the context sensitive interface ended up being. The inner-thoughts are a fantastic addition, both in terms of the players' connections to the main character, and to provide additional context and background to the story. - As far as canon goes, Ron recently stated (or perhaps tweeted) that the games that you need to play before ReMI are 1 and 2, and if you have time, Curse. Ron also said that those were the only games he played before working on ReMI. I really get the impression that they've made an active effort to keep Curse canon, and if the boot fits for EMI and Tales, great, but they aren't actively pushing to fit them into the mould of ReMI. Already going to predict that they aren't going to acknowledge any of the robot/grandpa stuff here. - Finally... a few observations about a potential timeframe. Wally mentions that he spent "years in therapy" in ReMI, and at the beginning of Curse, Guybrush says to Wally "The last time I saw you, we were prisoners in LeChuck's dungeon" referring to MI2. Both of these add more weight to the idea that the majority of the post-carnival game takes place after Tales. Also, Stan being trapped in the coffin in MI2 and let out in Curse also makes me doubt his ReMI scenes, at least, take place in between those games. That's all I can think of for now, but I am now officially in the process of replaying the original games! Will update the thread when I've finished them all. Two weeks to go!

I wanted to put these questions in the other poll, but it wouldn't let me... so two polls it is! (I won't do it again.)

Thank you, @LowLeveland @Remi. I edited my post to try to make that clear as well.

I'm basically torturing myself at this point reading all these interviews lol, but man are they hyping me up even more. I'm more excited about just starting at the carnival again than the Secret potentially being revealed. Preordered on both steam and switch. Also, saw another interview on Ron's Twitter. Apologies if this has been posted already: Fair Warning; there aren't necessarily full-blown spoilers in this interview, but Ron and Dave do get pretty deep into a story element and there are some implications on items and a puzzle. If you are really bunkering down from any real news, I would give this a skip. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/weve-finally-seen-return-to-monkey-island-in-action-looks-great-full-of-laughs/

I can't, this is the spoiler-free thread. 😐

In answering the survey, I tried to separate my emotional preferences from how I rationally think the game will be received by non-fans. For me, RtMI will be a great game, regardless of its artistic quality. However, it's only fair to remind myself that I'm talking about a game belonging to a small niche, which is generally not immediately appreciated by those who are not already familiar with the genre. Also, on the writing side, Ron has hinted at perhaps controversial ideas ("I think fans will be really excited and happy for what we did or totally angry about what we did." - Source) and in the past I have seen angry reviews and reactions to MI2 and TWP. So, I'm not sure even non-fans will love the game as well. I'm convinced that I'll love the game, but that has nothing to do with commercial success. When it comes to numbers usually associated to sales (e.g. Steam wishlists/followers, which are proxies to sales and can be statistically converted into vague sales estimations) it's clear that even the best prediction is far from the results of "Cult of the Lamb", which was strongly promoted and sold one million units in the first week. So, I am sure it will be a great game for me, and I can only hope for the developers that they will be pleased with both the critical reaction and the commercial results. 🙂

And to address the Wordle/Mojole thing: Total coincidence that both featured "WHOOP" on the same day. Unless Wordle ripped off Mojole, which sounds plausible.

Lol not a criticism. Like i said the intent was clear and i voted accordingly.

Fuck me. I 100%'d FFVII Remake and I totally missed that twist 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ The description was nothing to do with "twists". Just being blown away by something.

Those people don't exist... (to me) Personally I LOVE Curse. It's probably the one I go back to the most, simply because it's just so damn fun. But I think the original games have such a special place in people's hearts that it's hard to compare. The first two games kind of exist on their own tier, no matter how much you love the others. Well the poll isn't about if you care or not, just what you expect 🤷‍♂️

1 - I'm playing slowly, but I also have a fair amount of free time. If its a 10-20 hour casual playthrough like past games, I can play slow and still tear through it too fast. 2 - I've never solved a Monkey Island game on my own. I heavily used guides for all my first playthroughs of past games. I look forward to solving one without a guide. But I will use hints if I'm really stumped. 3 - I only consider spoilers to be major plot beats, shocking or surprising moments, and the final act of the story. None of the promotional material for RTMI so far qualifies as a spoiler by my standards. I respect people have different standards, but I think my definition of spoiler isn't uncommon either. I will be avoiding the spoiler thread, but look forward to reading it later. I think it will deepen my enjoyment of the game to read what other people think. But I also want the space to have my own thoughts.

Ha i get you. What i tend to do is check the score and see if Mix n Mojo and Ag like it. Then i play the game and then i read the review properly after finishing the game. 😁

This is an important question for me because, while playing the game, I may need to take a sneak peek at the scores for an editorial activity in which I am participating. So I am trying to figure out if it is possible to acquire this information without accidentally reading reports about the game's content. Reading only the Metacritic score should be easy, but visiting the actual review pages could prove dangerous.

Is it weird i'm really excited for reviews of Return to Monkey Island. I always got excited back in the day when mix n mojo and Adventure Gamers reviewed Tales of Monkey Island and Sam and Max seasons.

I genuinely did not read the thread. Just an educated guess.

New post: "Help! Looking for the in-game hint book!"

Curse was the first Monkey Island game I've ever played. With that being said, even after playing the others, I always thought that Big Whoop had something to do with the Secret and that LeChuck used its powers, but that he didn't really know how or why it worked that way. I mean, everybody knows that there's a weird voodoo power in Monkey Island that makes people ghosts/zombies/warps reality/creates giant monkey robots, but nobody knows why or how it's there, not even LeChuck

So do I, and, actually, this is the main aspect that made me super excited about the game, thanks to the high praise that the solution received from Noah Falstein and Dominic Armato, who found it remarkable. I'm not sure about that and my hope is that the cleverness of the solution is based on its simplicity. For example, what happens in the first minutes in the amusement park might simply be something that older Guybrush is remembering.

The headpiece to the Staff of Ra and the temple of doom voodoo doll/pin are now available for order on ShopDisney. https://www.shopdisney.com/indiana-jones-staff-of-ra-headpiece-465051893528.html?isProductSearch=1&plpPosition=undefined&searchType=autosuggest-popular&siteSearchTopProduct=1

I always felt the same way about the way the tunnels below the Monkey Head were treated in MI1. At the end Guybrush says "I never found the Secret of Monkey Island," and I thought, really? The hidden Hell-caves where the dead live on as ghosts weren't secret enough for you?

Yes, I like that this is kind of the same scene as the one with the pirate leaders in MI, and that Guybrush's responses are mostly the same, but the context is quite different. In Secret, he was too young and naive, and in Return he's too old and out of touch. He's still trying to prove himself as a mighty pirate, and still unflappable about his ability to prove it. I think that's a fun way of kind of returning to and re-contextualizing the situation from the first game.

Bill Tiller has always been very...proactive about establishing his position as a Monkey Island insider, and it's always struck me as a little disingenuous. He was obviously instrumental in establishing the aesthetic from Curse onward, and he deserves all the appreciation he gets for that, but there was a period there where he seemed to be trying very hard to fix his name in people's minds as "the Monkey Island guy" with stuff like this, and that always rubbed me the wrong way. (I think I've talked about this before, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.)

Noah Falstein said we were allowed to write essays! 😛

Console durability is also something with plenty of points of failure, across time. For example: your NES games might still work if you still had them, but any with battery backup are likely long dead and the saves erased, or worse the battery corroded and damaged the cartridge. Any physical media and the hardware to play it on requires vigilance and, past an inevitable point, upkeep. I hope with time, hardware virtualization and software emulation gets better and better to the point that some of this is moot. DREAMM in particular has given me a lot of hope. It really is the ideal: it emulates the original hardware and operating system so the games original data can run in a way it perceived as “natively,” and DREAMM can run a loose directory of game data, a disk image, or the original physical media if you have it along with the hardware to read it. I hope solutions like that become more and more common over time.

Ron has said that there will be a physical copy of the game: I'm not a collector, but I've purchased the boxed version of Thimbleweed Park because it felt the Right™ thing to do.

Oh my goodness. That's what hat monkey is for. Don't you get it? Don't you see? Hat monkey is there for Monkey Kombat training at Smirk's gym. Hat monkey is a Monkey Kombat expert that makes The Machine more than a match for the giant monkey from Escape.

Since we're getting into it a little. Preface all the following by saying: I completely respect anyone's decision to use or not use any game service for whatever reason they see fit. All the below is just where I land on it all, and other people's mileage may vary. Firstly, I think I have similar beef with CD Projekt that @Niemandswasser has talked about. For me the issues I have with them are far more personal to me and far more relevant to me than an ideological opposition to DRM. Secondly, I'm not really particularly ideologically opposed to DRM. I think it's unnecessary, and I think the best data we have shows it does very little to prevent piracy and could in fact contribute to the problem. GOG is right about that. But I largely subscribe to the idea that for almost as long as software has existed, software license agreements have existed. The idea of 'ownership' of commercial software has always been an illusion, for better or worse, and it ought to not be surprising or alarming that some companies would try to find technological solutions to enforcing the software license. Thirdly, over the years I have recieved quite mixed messages about whether Steam actually enforces DRM. As far as I can ascertain, it's the publishers that have to include it, rather than Steam thrusting it on everything. I'm willing to be educated on this, but as far as I know a game can exist on Steam with no DRM at all. It is true that if Steam disappeared your ability to download the game would also disappear but I think that's true of any online platform to download games, and has little to do with the DRM conversation. As I say I'm willing to be educated on this but because of my second point, I haven't been very motivated to look into it myself because I really am totally ambivalent about DRM. Fourthly, I believe that having a Steam library is a fair trade off in convenience. This is coming from a personal perspective, knowing how I play games - 95% I play a game once, and never again, and if I lost access to it I wouldn't even know. The other 5% of the time I might try to get a physical copy if I like the game enough. Or, if not available, I might buy it on multiple platforms. If all else fails, the idea of having to spend £5 re-buying a game I lost access to 20 years from now doesn't really haunt me. I know, I know, for some it's the principle of the thing less than the practicality of the thing... but see point 1. That principle is more important to me than the notion of possibly having to pay for something I used to own again at some undefined point in the future. Given that I lost my MI2 Amiga codewheel years ago, and one of my MI1 disks, and my MI1/2 CD is scratched to bits... I feel like it's just not accurate to say that our access to our own games is being put in jeopardy by DRM. It has never been less in jeopardy (preservation of old editions aside, which is a whole other conversation), even if the whole DRM industry feels like basically snake oil for media businesses. It is so easy for me to access all my games now and I have trouble with the idea that DRM is any sort of threat to that because I've never had that threat materialise, ever.

The good news is Disney does acknowledge FOA, as they have featured Sophia’s necklace at Jock Lindsay’s Hangar Bar (their Indiana Jones bar) at Walt Disney World.

So what you're saying is... Disney are selling these fine leather jackets https://www.shopdisney.com/indiana-jones-leather-jacket-for-adults-2840057819027M.html?isProductSearch=0&plpPosition=2