WorldMaker

Disney is on its fourth, I believe, attempt at a Haunted Mansion film. That’s partly because none have quite hit the PotC smash, but it’s also because Disney’s park IP is reliable and has decades of history that seems perennial. It’s world recognized IP with attractions on almost every continent. PotC will get rebooted in five/ten years without Johnny Depp as soon as their is a hip new director or action star wanting to take a stab at it. Monkey Island is a niche of a niche of IP that counts the original PotC attraction as upstream inspiration. Why would Disney ever make a Monkey Island film? Everybody already knows PotC, the brand, the attraction, etc. Lack of Johnny Depp isn’t going stop Disney. They might realize that Depp was a lightning in a bottle casting choice that they are unlikely to repeat, but the attraction existed decades before the Johnny Depp movies and will likely survive decades after them too. I’d love to see a Monkey Island film or a Disney+ show. Those are “take my money” grabhands ideas. I’ve even joked for several years now that I’d happily consult on a Disney+ show because I figured you could run Sea of Thieves directly in Disney’s “The Volume” space and do it as Live Action cartoonish realism on the relatively cheap. (The Volume uses Unreal engine primarily and SoT is Unreal as well and I think even the islands that aren’t specifically built for Monkey Island references look fitting for Monkey Island side tales.) I don’t see Disney actually doing anything like that at all though because they own PotC and that is IP with history and weight. Monkey Island is just a silly little thing to Disney they happen to own only by accident of buying Star Wars.

They definitely aren’t the real islands. In the interview Mike Chapman admits that all the Tall Tales take place in the Sea of the Damned. He says that in the context that they will be in spaces safe from PvP, but that also likely says a lot about where this all fits from a Lore perspective in Sea of Thieves: the Sea of the Damned is Sea of Thieves’ Limbo realm between deaths (where if you are lucky the Ferryman takes you back to the Sea of Thieves after you die instead of leaving you stuck somewhere in the Sea of the Damned). The Sea of the Damned is haunted by ghosts and memories. Those likely aren’t the real islands but the Memories of them. (Many of the NPCs like Stan would likely also be Memories.) Lore-wise this was also the case for much of A Pirate’s Life, the Pirates of the Caribbean Tall Tales, where most of the locations were the Memories of Captain Sparrow out in the Sea of the Damned. Guybrush getting accidentally trapped into his own memories of Secret of Monkey Island sounds very Guybrush (especially after Return).

Something I appreciated was how much the game seems to remark upon unfinished business, and crossing off the TODO list, and then often seems to further reward it when you go just a little bit beyond. That also continues to feed into the overall themes: The Secret itself being unfinished business to cross off a TODO list. A general sense of leaving the world a little better than you found it, or at least trying to put some things back (almost) into their proper places. (Be courteous to other treasure seekers.) The non-hidden achievements tell me I have a couple I missed to try for. I don't know all that I'm missing in hidden achievements either. I found at least one currently super-rare one according to Steam Achievements percentages. I wonder in general how many you can cross off of Elaine's "post mortem" conversation in general, that seemed enough like a "report card" that I'm wondering if there are incredibly hard versions of the puzzle solutions that "fix" some of the wrongs Elaine mentioned. But maybe Adventure Games have just conditioned me too much to think there are better solutions than the ones I found, and that plays into the themes too if there really is no way to solve some of them with an Adventure Games mindset, that you can't ever actually check the entire TODO list. I caught at least one other Papapishu (other than the one on Terror Island), I think it was while playing with various bits of fire on LeShip. It does amuse me that they avoided many of the obvious callbacks and jokes, but that one made it in and remained consistent.