Colorfinger

oh my god you’re right. It’s the “end of the night” firework show at Disneyland.

… or even more directly: https://www.disneytouristblog.com/starbucks-disney-world-guide/

Much as I hated it at the time, Star buccaneers seems like a perfect example of the incursion of outside businesses into Guybrush’s favorite park…

Given the file extension ends in bz, is it a bzip file?

An ultra-dark story about how Guybrush works as a flooring inspector in a theme park (except for real, no allusions to pirating) and uses fantasy with the figures to escape his incredibly mundane life. Also a new game should include him revealing the biggest monkey head he’s ever seen.

This would have been such a fun rug pull. There was an old episode of The Prisoner that did something similar.

Yes, agree with this. There feel like there are quite a few areas that should or could offer something (particularly Terror Island, where there are a number of places that literally only exist for a cutscene, to pick up one object, or for a trivia card), but don’t. My hope is that the critical (and hopefully commercial) success of Return will enable greater investment in the next game. Or maybe they can be like real modern developers, and release a DLC that restores Cogg Island and adds a bunch more content through the other islands too… I can dream

I think I’ve come to the one criticism I have of the game, and it’s not one I expected to say. I don’t think it’s hard enough. This was also my problem with Tales - it felt more like a journey on rails than something where I was actively participating to solve puzzles. In ye olde days, I remember uncovering a puzzle, then discovering that to solve that puzzle I had to solve three other puzzles, each of which had its own branches and nuances. The deepest I remember getting in terms of puzzles in Return was when I found out I needed a mop, and to get the mop I needed to get a cook book to the chef. It all felt rather simple by comparison. This is not to say that I didn’t love absolutely everything else about the game - I did. I suspect that might be very deliberate on the part of Ron/Dave to avoid driving people away from a frustrating adventure in a modern context, but I do wish that “hard” mode was actually hard - or at least had more layers of puzzling.

Oh definitely, I'm not meaning to suggest that it's entirely some grand master plan or that there is no way to enjoy the games at face value, I more mean that there has always been an undercurrent that the fourth wall breakage was intentionally allegorical, not just played for comedy's sake as a nod to a contemporary audience.

Just reopened the game and went there myself. You know it's interesting how much the overworld maps kind of look like theme park maps. Cogg island in particular gives me that feeling...

I wonder if that's a big part of it as well: you take from it what you bring to it. I am at that point in my life where I have a wife and two kids, and ready to reflect on the things that have gone before, so the game speaks to me directly. If I was playing it twenty years ago, I doubt I would have enjoyed it as much, or at least not in the same way. It wouldn't have felt so deep to me then - it might have even seemed like a shallow, confusing, cop out. In fact I did at the time adore Curse of Monkey Island and didn't understand how people could say it wasn't as good as LeChuck's Revenge. I'm not sure quite you mean when you say "this is kind of how I feel after playing RtMI". Do you mean that you feel like Ron/Dave missed the point of the series?

To be fair, the secret isn't "it's fantasies in a theme park." It's either the t-shirt (if you take it completely literally), or the secret is actually an allegory about searching for something that you may never (or perhaps should never) find. Or to put it differently, the real secret is the friends we made along the way. Maybe that patched in a different Secret, wouldn't that be a twist?

Sounds like something a flooring inspector would say... ... just kidding, I completely agree with you. RtMI is a mature reflection on life, not a rollicking pirate adventure. It's the culmination of years of thought about what Monkey Island and adventure gaming has meant to the original authors, and how their lives have been changed by it. My opinion is that this game (and Monkey 1 and Monkey 2) are entirely allegorical. It is not a literal pirate adventure, and taking it as such will inevitably lead to disappointment. I suspect where a lot of disappointment comes from is that Monkey 3, 4, and Tales were in fact rollicking pirate adventures with comedic fourth wall breaks. I think the reason this happened is because after Monkey 2 it wasn't perfectly clear whether the author's intent for fourth wall breaks was for comedy (think Spaceballs) or for allegory (think Twin Peaks). CoMI, Escape, and Tales all played it pretty safe, and while containing similar "out of place" things (Star Buccaneers for example), they missed the central point, because they had never received the full story. They just did their best, and so you ended up with a more Spaceballsy type fourth wall break. I would bet that Ron was extremely frustrated by that at the time. I would also bet that this is why he didn't want to accept them as "canon" until very recently, when he was able to find a framework to make them fit within his original intent. RtMI (and especially the ending) cements for me that the series is intended to be allegorical.

On the Guybrush / Elaine relationship, my feeling on it is this: Monkey 1, the relationship reflects the author's relationships: young guys who are chasing hot women and don't know what to do with them. Monkey 2, the relationship is more distant, more like she has matured, but he hasn't yet Return, both are now older and more mature, Elaine has come to accept Guybrush for who he is, and he no longer chases after her like a overgrown teenager I guess basically what I'm saying is that I think their relationship is probably also reflective of the author's feelings toward their partners at the time of writing. Their relationships in Monkey 3 and 4 feel more cartoonish (to me at least) because they're just a parody of the "true" feelings of the original authors rather than something which was being sincerely expressed.

Yes! I thought I saw a couple of PoTC references scattered throughout, including one to the ride that inspired the game (that inspired the movie, that changed the ride).

Well in that case... Here's the full scene! Just recorded it from my game (please excuse RTSS in the corner, I normally play much twitchier games..): https://streamable.com/twln4a You know this didn't occur to me until I read what you wrote, but by putting Guybrush into a world of flats and props, there is another meta layer to this ending. Isn't that basically what we (as players) have been doing this whole time? Guiding a character around a huge movie set (sort of) so that we can have a theme-park-like experience. Putting Guybrush directly into the theme park just adds an extra meta layer to the commentary: "Look, this is what you've been doing this whole time." It's kind of reminiscent of the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, when the Colonel tells you to shut off your Playstation, breaking the fourth wall in a very deliberate and in-universe kind of a way.

I thought the spoilery forum might be the best place for a thread about people's favorite references to previous games or other games in RTMI. I'll start off by sharing my favorite - the callback to the original ADVENTURE (Collosal Cave Adventure) in the XYZZY sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy_(computing)

"Dead Dead Dead" takes an awful lot of patience. Good thing we have phones these days to look at while we wait.

I mean honestly the idea that Guybrush is a Sam Lowry / Brazil like figure responding to trauma with fantasy is also just *chef's kiss*. In fact the retreat back to fantasy ending kind of cements that interpretation, as well as the fact that you can...

It seems to me that in the context of the extra note that you find in the scrapbook after completing the game (the "we're about to start developing this thing" note) this game effectively frames all Monkey Island games (including Return) as allegorical rather than literal, and is the clearest indicator to me that the entire point of Return is to cement the fact that the games are a reflection of what the authors are going through, and not meant to be thought about in any literal way whatsoever. There are funny characters along the way, funny ideas and events, but they're reflections on personal life - kind of like how The Matrix is sort of all about transhumanism, but really it's all about transsexuality and everything in the story is an allegory for the layers of disguise that society requires people to wear. The ending we get to in Return is the point at which for me Ron and Dave take out a baseball bat and start hitting you over the head and saying "do you get it yet? the 'secret' doesn't matter! it's an allegory!!!" Monkey Island is then a series about the adventure of living life, not literally about pirates (or monkeys, or demonic skulls), but the challenges that you face as you grow up as a human being. So roll on the next Monkey Island game all about the challenges of retirement homes, I guess. Maybe I'm completely off base, but that's what I took from it.