Return to Monkey Island: the sequel that made everyone wait thirty years

Ron Gilbert spent thirty-one years not making a Monkey Island game. He co-created two of them, left LucasArts, watched the studio make two further sequels without him, spent years making it clear in interviews that he had a specific ending in mind for the ambiguous close of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, and then, in 2022, released Return to Monkey Island through his own studio, Terrible Toybox, with Disney’s blessing to use the license. That’s an unusually long fuse for a punchline, and the game is entirely aware of the weight riding on it — which is either its greatest asset or the thing it can’t fully escape, depending on how forgiving you’re feeling about a joke thirty-one years in the making.

The reunion nobody expected to actually happen

The practical facts matter here because they’re rare in games: Gilbert, whose career-spanning design instincts shaped the whole genre, directed, and Dave Grossman — co-writer on the original Secret of Monkey Island — returned as co-writer, and Dominic Armato, who has voiced Guybrush Threepwood since The Curse of Monkey Island, reprised the role. That’s the closest thing to an authorial reunion the series has ever had, and it’s paired with a script explicitly framed as picking up immediately after LeChuck’s Revenge, treating everything the two sequels made without Gilbert — Curse, Escape from Monkey Island, Tales of Monkey Island — as, in the game’s own words, stories Guybrush told his own children rather than binding continuity. It’s a bold structural move: rather than reconcile three decades of divergent canon, the game simply declares its own authority over which threads matter, then gets on with answering the one question everybody actually wanted answered.

The art style announcement, months before release, caused the loudest pre-launch reaction the series has had: a flat, hand-drawn, almost paper-cutout look, a sharp departure from the painterly pixel art of Curse or the fuller 3D of Escape. Long-time fans reacted badly online before playing a frame of it. That reaction is worth dwelling on because it’s a useful data point about how attached players get to a series’ visual memory independent of its mechanics — the backlash was almost entirely aesthetic, settled down considerably once people actually played the thing, and says more about internet anticipation cycles than about the game itself.

Why it works: familiar grammar, new confidence

Mechanically, Return to Monkey Island is a conservative game, and that’s a compliment. The verb-lite point-and-click interface, closer to the streamlined version used in Curse and Tales than to the original’s full verb bank, keeps interactions legible; item combination and dialogue trees remain the core puzzle currency; insult sword-fighting returns, updated with new material but recognisably the same joke-as-combat system from 1990. Gilbert is trying to prove the genre grammar he helped invent still holds thirty years on, in a market that’s mostly moved past point-and-click as a commercial mainstream, surviving now largely on nostalgia-driven revivals and a smaller but devoted independent scene.

What’s new is a hint system built directly into the game rather than bolted on as a strategy-guide substitute — asking Guybrush’s own inner monologue for a nudge produces a joke first and a hint second, which keeps the tone consistent even when the player is explicitly asking the game to lower its own difficulty. That’s a smarter solution to the modern accessibility-versus-challenge tension than most legacy-franchise revivals manage: rather than pretend hint systems don’t compromise puzzle design, the game folds the hint request into the comedy itself, so asking for help never breaks the fourth wall the series has always been comfortable breaking anyway.

The chapter structure — the game explicitly divides itself into named chapters, several of which fold in flashbacks to a young Guybrush’s earlier attempts to become a pirate — gives Gilbert room to revisit the tone of the earliest games directly, rather than only alluding to it. Those flashback sequences are some of the strongest writing in the game precisely because they let the script be nostalgic about its own history without needing the framing device of “here’s a returning character from game two” to justify the trip backward.

The weight of an audience that never left

Few adventure games arrive with the kind of pre-existing scrutiny Return to Monkey Island carried. The original two games Gilbert made are foundational texts for the entire genre; the two he didn’t make, Curse and Escape, have their own devoted followings, and Curse in particular remains many players’ favourite entry despite Gilbert’s absence from it. Any new game bearing the name had to navigate a fanbase with three decades of accumulated, occasionally contradictory affection for different eras of the same fictional archipelago, and a director returning specifically to relitigate his own unfinished business with it.

That context shapes almost every design decision visible on screen. The decision to sideline Curse and Escape as in-universe embellishments rather than erase them outright — Guybrush’s framing narration treats them as stories he told his kids, meaning they still “happened” in some diegetic sense even as the game declines to treat their plot details as binding — is a genuinely careful piece of franchise management, letting fans of every era keep what they loved without forcing a single continuity to win. It’s a more generous solution than simply rebooting, and it required a script confident enough to hold multiple, slightly incompatible fan memories in its hand at once without collapsing under the contradiction.

The soundtrack leans into that same continuity-management instinct. Composers working under Gilbert’s direction rework musical motifs going back to Michael Land’s original scores, giving long-time players a constant low hum of recognition even in scenes and islands the series has never visited before. It’s a smaller thing than the plot’s handling of canon, but it does similar work: reassuring a returning audience that the people making this game know exactly what came before, even while pushing the story somewhere new.

Spoilers below

The whole game is structured as a very long walk toward one destination: Guybrush and Elaine, now married, are once again pursuing Big Whoop, with Guybrush determined to finally learn what it actually is. The answer the game gives — after the expected string of island-hopping, LeChuck confrontations, and inventory puzzles — folds the amusement-park ending of LeChuck’s Revenge into the “truth” of the series rather than discarding it: Big Whoop is revealed to be, within the fiction, a literal theme park that Guybrush is retelling as a bedtime story to his own children, who periodically interrupt the narration to question plot holes, gently satirising thirty years of fan nitpicking in real time.

It’s a clever answer in that it doesn’t actually resolve the 1991 ambiguity so much as reframe it as a feature: the “real” Monkey Island world was always a story Guybrush tells, layered inside another story Guybrush is telling his kids, layered inside a game Gilbert is telling his audience. Whether that lands as a satisfying capstone or an act of having your cake and eating it — refusing to pick a single literal answer even now, thirty-one years later — split critical and fan reaction sharply at launch, and it’s the single most-argued design decision in the entire series’ history. My own read is that it’s the honest choice: Gilbert never actually had a tidy single answer to give, by his own admission in interviews over the decades, and a game that pretended otherwise at this late stage would have been lying to cash the nostalgia cheque. Better an ending that owns its own artifice than one that manufactures false closure.

Where the game is more straightforwardly satisfying is in its treatment of Elaine, who gets substantially more agency and screen time than in any prior instalment, actively driving plot rather than being rescued or sidelined, and in its treatment of LeChuck, whose menace is finally allowed to curdle into something closer to pathos by the finale — a zombie pirate who’s spent three decades chasing the same unrequited obsession as the hero, and knows it.

The children who interrupt Guybrush’s narration deserve a closer look, because they’re the game’s cleverest structural device. Every time a plot hole opens — why does Guybrush recognise a location he supposedly hasn’t visited, why does a minor character reappear conveniently — one of the kids asks the exact question a forum thread would ask, and Guybrush’s evasive or self-serving answers are themselves character work: this is a man who has spent thirty years polishing his own legend in the retelling, and the gaps in his story are gaps a proud unreliable narrator would leave. It reframes every previous game’s looser plotting as a feature of Guybrush’s storytelling rather than a flaw in the original scripts, which is a generous retroactive gift to games Gilbert didn’t even write.

The finale’s confrontation with LeChuck also does something the earlier games never risked: it lets the villain articulate his own motivation without the scene collapsing into a joke immediately afterward. LeChuck’s pursuit of Elaine across five games gets reframed here as a genuinely sad kind of stasis, a character who’s defined his entire existence by a rejection he can’t process, and the game gives that beat room to breathe before pulling back to comedy. It’s a tonal risk for a series built on never taking its own stakes too seriously, and it mostly pays off because it’s earned by three decades of the same joke being told at LeChuck’s expense.

For anyone coming to this fresh off the ambiguous 1991 ending, the recommendation is straightforward: play it, but go in accepting that “closure” here means “an answer that argues the question was always the point,” not a tidy solved mystery. If what you actually want next is the game that made this one necessary, that’s LeChuck’s Revenge itself — the ending this entire game exists to have a conversation with, thirty-one years late and considerably more self-aware about it than anyone had a right to expect.