The Curse of Monkey Island: the adventure at its most beautiful

Ron Gilbert left LucasArts before work started on a third Monkey Island game, taking with him whatever answer he had for the ambiguous ending of LeChuck’s Revenge. That left directors Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern with an unusual assignment: continue one of the most beloved comedy series in games, without its creator, six years after the previous entry, in a genre whose commercial ceiling was already visibly lower than it had been in 1990. The Curse of Monkey Island, released in 1997, is their answer, and it remains one of the strongest arguments in the medium for the idea that a franchise can survive — even thrive — under new authorship, provided the new authors understand exactly what made the thing worth continuing.

The look that redefined the series

The first thing anyone notices about Curse, then and now, is that it looks completely unlike its predecessors. Where the first two games ran on chunky, saturated pixel art constrained by early-’90s VGA palettes, Curse was built around hand-painted, Disney-adjacent cel animation — characters and backgrounds designed with the fluid, exaggerated proportions of theatrical cartoon shorts, rendered at a resolution and colour depth the SCUMM engine’s earlier games couldn’t have supported. Bill Tiller’s art direction gives Guybrush a lankier, more expressive design than his blocky 1990 sprite, and gives the world a lushness — tropical sunsets, candlelit taverns, a genuinely gorgeous pirate-ship interior — that no earlier LucasArts adventure had attempted. It’s aged better than almost any other adventure game of its era for exactly that reason: hand-painted 2D art doesn’t date the way early 3D or low-resolution pixel work does, and Curse’s backgrounds still look like finished paintings rather than technology straining at its own limits.

The animation carries the comedy differently, too. Where the earlier games relied on text and static or lightly-animated sprites for their jokes, Curse’s fluid character animation lets physical comedy land the way it would in a cartoon short — timing, exaggeration, a raised eyebrow held a beat too long. It’s a different comic register from the first two games’ dry, text-forward humour, closer to the LucasArts style, and it works because the writing team, which included veteran adventure writer credits stretching back through the studio’s history, understood how to write jokes that the new animation could actually sell.

Why it works: giving Guybrush a voice, literally

The other defining change is that Curse is the first Monkey Island game to be fully voiced, and it’s the game that introduced Dominic Armato as Guybrush Threepwood — a piece of casting so complete that every subsequent game in the series, including Ron Gilbert’s own Return to Monkey Island a quarter-century later, brought Armato back rather than recasting. Full voice acting sounds like a straightforward technical upgrade, but it changes the comedy fundamentally: jokes that lived on the page as dry asides in the first two games now depend on delivery, and Curse’s script is written with that shift firmly in mind, giving Armato’s Guybrush a self-satisfied, slightly oblivious warmth that becomes the character’s defining voice for every game after.

The insult sword-fighting returns once more, expanded into a genuine card-based minigame — Guybrush collects “insult cards” from defeated opponents and must assemble a hand that counters whichever card an enemy plays, turning a system that had been mostly static since 1990 into something with actual strategic depth for the first time. It’s a good example of a returning series mechanic being meaningfully iterated on rather than merely repeated, and it sits alongside a genuinely large cast of new characters — the pirate lords guarding Blood Island, the ghostly crew Guybrush recruits, LeChuck’s various disguises — who all benefit from the animation and voice work in ways the earlier games’ cast never got the chance to.

Puzzles built for the new toolset

Curse’s puzzle design is also quietly more generous than either of its predecessors, in ways that reflect lessons LucasArts had absorbed from six years of player feedback since LeChuck’s Revenge. Inventory items are limited at any given time to what’s actually relevant to the current chapter, cutting down on the kind of sprawling item-hoarding that made the second game’s harder puzzles feel like guesswork. Dialogue trees are used more deliberately as puzzle gates in their own right, with information from one conversation frequently required to unlock a new dialogue option in a completely different location — a structure that rewards paying attention to every line rather than clicking through text to get back to item-combining. It’s a smaller, less flashy design improvement than the art or the voice cast, but it’s the one that made the game’s difficulty curve feel fair to contemporary reviewers in a way LeChuck’s Revenge’s infamous monkey-wrench puzzle sometimes didn’t.

A gentler, funnier register

Tonally, Curse sits closer to the first game’s cheerful comedy than to LeChuck’s Revenge’s stranger, more body-horror-adjacent tone. There’s less interest here in unsettling imagery and more in pure gag construction — extended set pieces built around escalating absurdity, a running joke about a cursed ring that turns Elaine to gold, a memorable detour through a haunted ghost ship crewed by pirates who can’t remember how they died. It’s a choice that drew some criticism at the time from fans who wanted the new team to push LeChuck’s Revenge’s ambiguous ending further rather than sidestep it, but taken on its own terms it’s an unusually confident piece of tonal management: a new creative team, working without the series’ co-creator, correctly judging that “funnier and more polished” was a safer and more sustainable direction than trying to out-weird a script they hadn’t written.

The shanty that outlived the game

Curse’s score, composed by Michael Land and Clint Bajakian, includes one piece of music that’s arguably better known today than the game itself among people who’ve never played it: “A Pirate I Was Meant to Be,” a fully-lyricked sea shanty performed by the game’s pirate cast as an actual musical number, complete with harmonised verses and a memorable, driving melody. LucasArts adventures had used music expressively before — the iMuse system in the earlier Monkey Island games adapted score to on-screen action — but Curse is the first entry to stage an outright musical sequence, treating song as a storytelling tool in its own right rather than only as ambient scoring. The number has had a strange afterlife, covered by fans, referenced by later games in the series, and cited by more than one games composer as a formative example of how far a licensed adventure game could push a set-piece song before it started to feel like a stunt rather than a genuine narrative beat.

That confidence in a full musical number is a useful shorthand for what the whole game is doing: taking every tool LucasArts had accumulated over three prior adventures — expressive animation, adaptive scoring, a returning cast, a proven puzzle grammar — and using a genuine production upgrade in team and budget to push each of those tools further rather than simply repeating them at the same scale. It’s the difference between a sequel that inherits a formula and one that treats the formula as a foundation to build on.

Spoilers below

The plot picks up moments after LeChuck’s Revenge ends, with Guybrush and Elaine’s small boat capsized by a storm — the game’s script simply declines to engage with the amusement-park ambiguity that closed the previous entry, restarting the story on the water as though the fireworks-factory ending had been literal all along. Guybrush accidentally proposes to Elaine with a cursed ring stolen from a pirate ghost ship, turning her into a living gold statue, and spends the rest of the game hunting down Big Whoop — treated here, unambiguously, as a literal magical treasure rather than a metafictional theme park — in order to reverse the curse.

The game’s structure sends Guybrush through Plunder Island’s pirate-lord trials (a direct structural echo of the first game’s three trials, now explicitly acknowledged as an echo by the script itself) before a final confrontation with LeChuck aboard his ship, where Guybrush defeats him using the accumulated insult-card system built up across the whole game. Elaine is restored, LeChuck is banished rather than killed — keeping him available for future instalments, which the series would indeed use him in repeatedly — and the game ends on a genuinely warm, uncomplicated note: a wedding, played entirely straight for once, rather than undercut by a joke or a fourth-wall break.

The Plunder Island trials deserve a closer look, because they’re where the game most directly reckons with its own inheritance. Guybrush must earn passage past three pirate lords, and the script has each of them explicitly reference the “three trials” structure from the first game — one lord even complains that the whole ritual feels overly familiar, a joke that only works because the game trusts its audience to remember the 1990 original in detail. Rather than avoid repeating the series’ own most famous structural beat, Ackley and Ahern lean into the repetition and turn it into commentary, which is a more confident move than either slavishly copying the original or discarding the structure altogether would have been.

That sincerity is, in retrospect, the boldest choice Ackley and Ahern made. A series famous for refusing easy closure — LeChuck’s Revenge’s entire legacy is its refusal — gets, here, an ending that simply commits to happiness without irony. It’s a smaller risk than reinventing the series’ visual language, but it’s a real one, and it’s part of why Curse remains, for a large slice of the fanbase, the entry they’d recommend first to someone new to the series: gorgeous, generous, and unafraid to let its characters actually be happy. If the ambiguity of the ending it politely ignores is what interests you more, go back one step to LeChuck’s Revenge itself, the game whose loose thread this one so cheerfully declines to pull.