Jake

Amazing. I think I’m the one who told him about the giant monkey robot in Escape, sometime in the early-mid ‘00s when interviewing him. Glad that together we spoiled the final act of Monkey Island 4 for Ron!

How did I do this 👕 I beat #Mojole #185 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 2/6 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I think it’s wildly influenced by memes, reactionary acts of snap judgement, and has its own meta that can be pretty disconnected from the world at large. Within that context, what you say is true, but it’s a helluva context. I didn’t read it as “teehee,” and more like, any of these things individually are less bad than some of the truly bad things we’ve encountered, but you should look at the aggregate effect you’re having because it might not add up to something great. It read to me as Elaine extending Guybrush a line of trust, but also as an increasingly tenuous one. Like, she didn’t need to say he was on outrageously thin ice, and if he couldn’t read the room he would be in trouble. I saw the guybrush in the frame story as one who took that conversation to heart. It’s part of why I don’t really want a Monkey Island 7!

Though I’m glad there is a ton of conversation happening in the Monkey Island subreddit, the Reddit threads have made me slightly insane because of the common Reddit pattern: in any given subreddit if you like something (the game or tv show or whatever or, for example, your electronic device works properly) you reply in the comments about your experience, but if you don’t like something (or your thing is broken) you just go and make a new thread about it. I find that though Reddit reads as “honest” to some eyes, because of how surfaced negative reactions are, that’s really because the combination of how humans work and how Reddit works means that gripes end up on the front page of a sub in multiple dupes, and people enjoying a thing end up buried. It gets to the point that you end up with people making posts saying “am I the only person who likes the thing/am I the only person who isn’t having problems?” and moderators often have to start forcibly enacting rules to make the people who all have the same thought (or gripe, or problem) post in the same thread together instead of starting new ones. That’s not to say not liking something is somehow uncommon, but it is to say I think Reddit in particular ends up surfacing negative reactions and people in search of others who feel that way, than it is good at surfacing “I enjoyed it.” The art style of Return had this pattern, where many who had a problem with it decided they needed to make their own unique thread in the subreddit to show people why they in particular didn’t like it. The people who did like it mostly stuck to the game announcement and trailer megathreads. It created the feeling that the number of people who had a negative first reaction to the art vastly outnumbered the people who did, when in reality it was either a more balanced distribution, or they were a minority. We’ll obviously never know the actual split (and fortunately it doesn’t really matter how many people do or don’t like a thing), but it’s a reminder that Reddit isn’t actually a barometer of anything, especially just looking at how many threads of what type hit the front page of a subreddit, or generate the most comments. sorry I just wrote way more than I meant to about Reddit. Anyway I liked the ending. I don’t think the game was universally great, but it hit me personally pretty hard and has remained on my mind for months since I first played even an unfinished version. I usually don’t like “it was all a dream” or “YOU get to figure out what it means” endings either, for what it’s worth. I think there is more going on in Return than that. I am unfortunately a very by-the-seat-of-my-pants thinker who intuits a lot quickly and then am slow to catch up with the actual mechanical backing of those reactions (which can sometimes drive my coworkers crazy) AND I’m a big procrastinator, so I have been slow as hell to contribute meaningfully to this thread other than off topic stuff about Reddit, but I feel like the thematic throughlines across Return are very strong, and to me at least they felt fresh, within Monkey Island and gaming and the current pop media landscape.

Here’s a shot I took the Photo Booth and an extremely Part 5-appropriate look behind it featuring @Dmnkly

It’s be cool if it’s newsworthy! But also, this has been Craig’s crusade for years. I read this more as, his enthusiasm has been rekindled (or … just more kindled) by Return’s reception.

These are all valid mops! The others can be safely thrown in the fire.

Yeah it is definitely cut content! But as a space it looked compelling. Nowhere near as substantial as Melee or Brr Muda, but more substantial than Scurvy. I would love to know what they’d planned for it and how it was supposed to fit. (And if it was always underwater and the timer played a role there, or if it was only “sunk” when turning it into an Easter egg.)

There’s plenty about the game I don’t like or wish would have been done in (to my eyes) a better way, but pulling those things apart is infinitely less interesting to me than talking about what worked, what impact it had on me, and why. That’s an easier thing for me to say in this case because the large majority of the game worked for me, so I’m here with that attitude able to talk about most of the game, and I’m fine discarding the minority for the purposes of digging into the good bits on this forum. I think too much of the critical discourse on the internet is dedicated to talking about why something failed, why something is bad, why something was a disaster, and I almost never find it interesting, because the answers are often the same (unless the story of why something failed is truly spectacular). But hearing about why something DID work, or (more specifically) what effect a work had when it passed through the brain and is filtered through the life experiences of any human being outside myself, is almost always interesting. I have sympathy for when something you’re excited for doesn’t do it for you, because that feeling absolutely sucks. And sometimes breaking down why it didn’t work is useful, and commiserating is also often useful as a way to move on from being let down by something you were hoping to like. But telling people who did like it that they’re wrong, and here’s why, is never going to do anything helpful for anyone, especially in an online context. (Maybe if we were good friends and had this conversation over lunch, maybe!)

Keeping the title spoiler free, but this is definitely a spoiler thread. Has anyone found and visited the other island in the game? Not the tiny one hidden in the crooks of the map that you need to find to complete the game, but the whole secret island sunken beneath the sea? If you get the trivia card about Cogg Island, and see an answer that looks like map coordinates, pick the coordinates and then sail there and dive into the ocean! I haven’t done this yet but watched a YouTube video about it and, immediately switched it off because it looked substantial I want to explore it for myself, but there’s a whole other place hidden inside the game, attached to the trivia card sub-game.

I believe the amusement park fantasy is the original, and that is the meaning of the plaque. The tshirt is your reward for finding the secret, and is a fun callback to the three trials. I don’t think the tshirt would hit as hard without the passage of time, the pent up desire, but the amusement park fantasy thread has always been there.

WARNING: THIS THREAD AND ARTICLE ARE AS SPOILERY AS IT GETS! It turns out that the very end of Return gets pretty ragged and frayed; the different things you do in the final few scenes can tip the games conclusion and epilogue in many directions. Mojo has compiled all the ones they’ve found so far and it’s already a whopping ten variations. That article is a great writeup of what’s currently known about the different endings and epilogues including full video capture of all of them and how to get them. (Pour one out for the Mojo staffers who watched the entire credit sequence dozens of times to tease all these endings out and then verify how they are reached!)

as @Joe monsters said, it actually starts off very in line with Monkey 2: and is only after the kids stop “playing” the end of Monkey 2 and start thinking about what to do next, that it changed to the less extravagant park.

Disc and GOG versions only, for inexplicable reasons.

I don’t think so. Madison’s gang is, if memory serves, referred to as “dark magic pirates” and I think the graffiti is some sort of spell or threat? But I was never clear on it. Have they taken over Melee by force? Some sort of charm? It’s a point where the fact that I last played through six months ago is hurting my ability to remember details since this was already fuzzy.

They’re related to Madison’s gang but I didn’t entirely understand it.

It’s undocumented but right stick also works for hotspot switching and lets you do it directionally. Just great all around.

Go for it!

👕 I beat #Mojole #183 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💛🖤🖤💛💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Ooh! I think I saw others in a Steam post but can’t find them now. I hope they have the time to both list them all out somewhere on a wiki or GitHub, AND time to do a full keybind screen at some point. I’d really like to put “open inventory” on middle click in a future playthrough.

I’m tempted to do a music-only stream or something like it just to be able to hear it in isolation.

Your English is great. If you hadn’t said anything nobody would have noticed

I hadn't even realized there wasn't a battle against LeChuck until people online started pointing it out! Now I kind of wonder what one would be like, but I also think its pretty great that they didn't do it. LeChuck is stuck on the wheel, now along with Madison and her crew, but Guybrush managed to get out (it seems, at least?!). I know the folks who like Tales had wondered if any of its plot elements would come up in Return, especially the LeChuck/Guybrush/Voodoo Lady stuff that appeared in the very late parts of Tales' story. I didn't expect them to reference any of it, and they didn't, BUT when I think back on those parts of Tales, I remember Elaine was consistently pushing Guybrush to not keep falling into the same patterns (which LeChuck was insisting the Voodoo Lady was forcing them into through deceit). In Return, Guybrush actually escapes the pattern, with some nudging from Elaine, but LeChuck definitely does not! Guybrush eventually pops out of it to a theme park where everything is stuck on loop, but he's not part of it anymore, and can go home. I know that is probably not the primary read of that ending scene, but that whole notion of Guybrush and LeChuck on an endless wheel from Tales re-entered my brain this week and I was glad to see that Return has some resonance and resolution to that thematic arc, even if the "lore" parts about the voodoo lady are left behind.

I think Murray’s theme from tales gets a little appearance in a cutscene.

I don’t know how much there is. I heard it described as playing a DVD with the deleted scene special features stitched back in. In my experience that is good for satisfying intellectual curiosity and sometimes it works really well, but often you say “ah yeah I see why that was cut, in context.” Seemed like a good “second playthrough” feature to me.