#41: The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, Amiga, 1990)

For a long time, its own sequel aside, The Secret of Monkey Island was unquestionably the funniest game ever written. A title it not only held, but held without any real challengers until at least 2007, and arguably until 2011, and even then, give Monkey Island a voice cast of the caliber of Ellen McLain, Stephen Marchant and JK Simmons, and it could still hold its own. It is a triumph. I want to say this at the beginning, because I am going to get critical about certain aspects of the game, because that’s sort of what we do here, but before we get to that, I want to be absolutely clear that I love this game. A lot. So, I’m making a note here. Huge success.

That said, it’s not perfect. Playing it now, basically remembering the solutions to every puzzle in the game, it’s hard not to notice that in that aspect, the game kind of runs out of steam once you actually reach Monkey Island™. In the first act, on Melee Island™, there are a whole lot of different things you could be doing at any one time, different puzzles you could be solving. You have three grand overarching goals; the Three Trials required to become a pirate, and a multitude of smaller goals to complete on the way to each of those. Even in the relatively small-scale second act, confined entirely to the rather cramped location of your ship, there are still a good few things to be done at any given time.

On Monkey Island™, by contrast, there is frequently only one thing that it’s possible to achieve, and you are often required to make the long and increasingly tedious trek from one side of the island to the other in order to do so. It’s an issue that the game ultimately acknowledges and makes fun of itself for, but this only exacerbates the frustration; if the developers were aware enough of the problem to mock it, they couldn’t have just fixed it?

Ultimately, for all that the birds-eye view map of Monkey Island™ makes it look huge and expansive when you first arrive, the reality just can’t live up to that awe-inspiring moment, and in truth, it feels far smaller than the opening Melee Island™, where the game truly shines. The comedy, on the other hand, remains fantastic; the fact that the denizens of Monkey Island™ (shipwrecked castaway Herman Toothrot, a native tribe of cannibals and the evil Ghost Pirate LeChuck) communicate primarily through passive-aggressive memos is up there with everything about used-ship salesman Stan as one of the game’s best jokes.