LowLevel

It is definitely warmer than yesterday. Some rain is expected in the afternoon and I'm really hoping the temperatures will drop, even if it means accepting more humidity. Last year, in the same period, it was a sight: hot but not too hot, clear skies...

I have always loved the atmosphere in Scabb Island 😍 and it would be probably the only island that I would like to visit again in the future but... not in Return to Monkey Island. The developers were clear that characters and locations already visited in past games will be in the game because that was necessary for the story and not to simply satisfy the nostalgia of old fans like me. I'm glad that they decided to approach the writing in this way, I wouldn't like the game to feel too much like a throwback game. To me, discovering new places is more interesting and I would like to get a game that feels like a new Monkey Island. So I'm more than happy that I'll visit Melee Island and Monkey Island again, but that's more than enough to satisfy my nostalgia. 🙂

I am not sure how to conform to the discussion, so I will state that I will play the game as slowly as a AT-AT walker.

I don't feel comfortable with this development of the story. 😐 That's debatable.

A question hit me, increasing the damage: what topics can we discuss in this thread?

I agree with both how difficult it might be to write a good sequel and the quotes that you put around "final". 😛

I don't know how much I would be interested in future Monkey Island games. My personal take on the whole franchise has been "an incomplete trilogy with additional nice spin-offs" and once Ron gives closure to that trilogy, I don't think that I would find future games attractive as Return to Monkey Island. I'm not close to them, though, and I'm sure that I would purchase and enjoy future games as well, exactly as I have enjoyed Monkey Island games that were not designed to provide answers to the questions left open in the first two games. 🙂 Probably I would be interested more on Ron working on something different and new, something not necessarily linked to past games. But I would crave Thimbleweed Park 2. 😛

For me, the biggest reveal was in the last part of the article. I hoped for something and now I know that my wishes have been granted. I won't go into details.

About that Ars Technica article, I think that we're entering a zone that some players might find seriously spoilering, so I'll report here the warning of the editor: Editor's note: This article is careful not to spoil a single puzzle, joke, or unannounced character reveal. One plot-specific reveal, which Gilbert and Grossman were happy to announce, lands near the end of the article.

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. 🙂

Oh, nothing special... Original interview: https://youtu.be/r3Dbi1b8QDE?t=3392 Article that reported it: https://www.thegamer.com/return-to-monkey-island-masters-phd-thesis/

I would be fine with those 10 minutes matching what Noah said and the rest of the game being meh. 😛

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

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.

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.

How I felt about Chuckie's flashing eyes, the first time I finished MI2, is exactly how Ron Gilbert has described the ending: "a huge cliffhanger". (Source) I'm aware that many players didn't perceive it as such, but I've always considered it not just "a" cliffhanger, but a very big one.

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.

Thank you for all the work, the results are really [superlative praising adjective]! I would like to propose a small change: I tried to share it somewhere and the title in the snippet was simply "The International House of Mojo", because that's the text in the "og:title" and "twitter:title". And well... it doesn't explain to the casual viewer what the thing is. What about changing "title", "og:title" and "twitter:title" to "Mixnmojo's Return to Monkey Island countdown!" or something similar? And maybe even writing a description? Sorry to bug you again, but it worked before.

😃 👕 I beat #Mojole #167 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 2/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/ My magic starting word has helped a lot!

I'm not very familiar with how these embargos work. Could some website publish a review before the release date/time/moment?

It was a great session and a stellar panel! 😃 Watch it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1581145334 Things that I liked: Roberta hijacked the very first question and started immediately to promote their new game. Lowe was, expectedly, a great source of impromptu jokes. Jane Jensen being there. Ron’s t-shirt. The question about their best and their worst puzzle! Things that I didn’t like: It was so focused on questions about the old times that there were few mentions of their new games. RtMI was only tangentially mentioned. How on earth is it possible that nobody asked Jane Jensen if she expects to make new games? @Jake : did you manage to attend the session? P.S. I'm not sure if it's OK to cross-post something that I also wrote in a different site, but I wanted to share my thoughts with this community as well. Let me know if cross-posting isn't appreciated. 🙂

Yes! I mean: thank you so much! 🫀

I'm referring to this:

Question to those who know the forum better than me: can I expect to find zero spoilers in the title of the topics listed in the "General Discussion" category? I don't know whether I should bookmark this discussion and visit it without looking at the category page, or whether it is safe to visit the category page as well.