Tales of Monkey Island

Considering this over Thanksgiving. Escape from was released in 2000, Tales of was released in 2009, and it's 2019 now, so we're about due for another, right?

Ron Gilbert wrote this a few years after Escape from Monkey Island and a few years before Tales of Monkey Island. Wonder how he feels now.

Review, in Brief:

Best iteration on "insult sword fighting" yet; a good addition to LeChuck's ghost-zombie-demon sequence; lots of nice parallels to (and inversions of) the first two games. Gameplay is a fixed version of games three and four, though the interface kind of annoyed me - wish I could skip cut scenes, and didn't have to reopen the inventory every time an item fails to interact with the environment.

Classic Adventure Game Sins:

Most of the puzzles are good! But: there's a few where you have to just try your inventory against every person and object in the environment; one (escaping the crossroads) that can be solved multiple ways, yet the game only accepts the solutions in a specific order; one (the pirate chest on the beach) where you might understand the solution well before you find which trivially and imperceptibly different permutation of it the game wants; one early puzzle only makes sense if you're playing on console instead of PC; and the crossroads map seems to have an extra location that you can't ever get to.

An Unsatisfying End (highlight to read):

There's a bunch of plotholes whose timings are hard to reconcile - how does Elaine know how to open the crossroads, where did Morgan's body go, when did Morgan make the deal with the Voodoo Lady - and although I enjoy the symmetry of Morgan giving Guybrush a pep talk, the pep talk didn't fit, and in the final fight she's kind of superfluous (I was expecting Guybrush to ditch his corporeal body and stab the Voodoo God with a ghost sword of his own). If we're taking a page from the movies, maybe the Voodoo Lady being a sea god trapped in human form and that's why she needs the heart of a voodoo god, but it's just plain annoying for the game to pretend that she's been the prime mover all along.

The Future?

I was looking forward to spending time as Ghost Pirate Threepwood (and then Zombie Pirate Threepwood, and so on). If the writers feel Guybrush is played out, Elaine as protagonist might make a nice change of pace. Felt like they were setting her and Morgan up for a rivalry in the next game, with Guybrush as kidnapee/trophy.

Brisco County Jr was fresh in my mind, so at first blush I thought Morgan was Guybrush and Elaine's time-traveled daughter; then when Elaine and Morgan simultaneously stabbed the Voodoo God, I thought she might be a splinter of Elaine that had been split off with voodoo. She could of course simply be a fresh-faced analogue for who Guybrush was when he washed up on Mêlée Island at the beginning of game one, and that's fine too.

P.S.:

No, I haven't played Thimbleweed Park or Double Fine's The Cave yet.