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

The other thing that really stood out during this playthrough was the oft-praised insult swordfighting section. Knowing the solutions to every puzzle going in, The Secret of Monkey Island can all be breezed through in a fairly short time. All except the insult swordfighting section. Because knowing the answers doesn’t actually help here. I still had to go through the motions of fighting a string of hapless idiots to ‘learn’ all the comebacks that I could recite from memory. Which is, let’s be fair, not a problem with the game as much as it is a problem with playing a 26-year old game for the tenth time.

But either way, it means that insult swordfighting exerts a strange gravity on the game, and gains more prominence than perhaps it was supposed to. Which in turn gives more importance to Carla, the Sword Master of Melee Island™. And, to be clear, this is something that absolutely works in the game’s favour. Because Carla is absolutely fantastic. A woman of colour who is not just portrayed as being incredibly good at her job, but completely accepted as such by her exclusively male peers. And in a game that is so focused on humour, it would have been so easy to make this into a punchline somewhere along the way; to build up your expectations of the Sword Master as something that she isn’t, and then, surprise! She’s a black woman! But this really doesn’t happen. You learn fairly early on that her name is Carla, and then when you actually meet her, you find out that she’s black, and both of these things are treated as entirely unremarkable facts by all parties concerned. Which is, unfortunately, absolutely remarkable.