The fourth entry in the Monkey Island franchise makes a satisfactory jump to the third dimension.

User Rating: 8 | Escape from Monkey Island PC

This was the first Monkey Island game that this reviewer had played, but to this reviewer's relief, playing the previous games was not a requirement to familiarize oneself with the premise of the game. However, this being a Monkey Island game, some bewilderment was to be expected when the trademark humour of this franchise starts rolling.

In this game, its main protagonist, who is the pirate-wannabe Guybrush Threepwood, is now happily married with the other main protagonist of the franchise, the feisty Caribbean governor Elaine Marley. After their honeymoon (which was thankfully uneventful) has ended, they return to the current home of Elaine Marley (her governorship apparently gets transferred from island to island occasionally).

Instead of home-sweet-home waiting for their return, they find that Elaine had been declared officially dead (due to the apparent lack of any awareness of the concept of leave-taking) and that said home is about to be demolished. This is where the adventure offered by the game to the player starts. Elaine Marley takes off to settle the issue of getting herself legally resurrected and re-elected governor, while leaving other matters to her husband.

Of course, Guybrush is not happy either, but being a fictional character under the direct-but-not-complete control of a disembodied benefactor (that is, the player) who is eager to get him into trouble just for his/her entertainment, he has little choice.

From here, the player has Guybrush navigating the environments which are contained within each of the game's four acts, solving problems along the way to restore Elaine's status and making sure everyone knows that Guybrush the Mighty Pirate exists. Of course, looking like a foppish wimp and having an evil immortal pirate as a nemesis make matters so much harder to accomplish; surprising plot twists that can be expected in a Monkey Island also bring further complications.

Being an adventure game requires this game to have challenging and worthwhile puzzles to solve. Being a Monkey Island title further requires this game to have situations that can be resolved (or in some cases, deliberately worsened) using inane or outright silly (but not necessarily illogical) solutions. Escape from Monkey Island does not disappoint in fulfilling both expectations.

The player will have Guybrush encountering obstacles and (generally) unhelpful characters who would typically not lend a hand without something in return. Ever the generous gentleman (or so he thinks himself to be) yet bumbling buffoon that Guybrush is, the player can have him solving these puzzles with solutions that get what he needs to progress in the game, but not necessarily leaving matters tidy behind. In fact, most of the situations that he comes across, he just makes them entertainingly worse, with usually one or two items missing from the picture and of which Guybrush takes away and stores in his very, very roomy pockets.

Speaking of his inventory, which can apparently store all manner of items, even volatile ones like explosives or incendiaries (which is a minor gag that gets repeated throughout the franchise), the player gets an interface that is easy to look through. It is not exactly tidy, but there is enough space for both the display of the items' models and the captions that describe them. More importantly, this inventory system allows the combining of items with each other (though it had yet to use the more convenient click-and-drag system found in latter day Monkey Island games). Handy highlighting of items (which is often taken for granted in the adventure game genre) tells which one is being actively selected for combination with other stuff in Guybrush's inventory.

Of course, not every item can be combined with each other, and Guybrush points this out with often repetitive nay-sayings. Fortunately, most puzzles in this game are not so ridiculous as to require terrifically outlandish solutions, so if the player thinks that merging that tourism pamphlet with a cup of (weak) coffee is not going to produce anything new, then it likely won't.

It is also worth noting here that items that are meant to be combined with each other, but the reason for which is not immediately clear, can be combined anyway, which is an occurrence that Guybrush will point out with a witty, almost fourth-wall-breaking remark. (He may also make another one, which may not have been mentioned at all, when the situation that requires the combined item does come up.) There is no pre-condition that is needed for the combination of said item. This likely deliberate omission indirectly provides a sort of handy way for players to attempt to bulldoze through a section of a game when they are stumped.

(To the credit of the writers too, attempting to use items willy-nilly on objects will often result in Guybrush making witty comments, with a vague hint of what the items should be used on.)

Part of the charm of the Monkey Island franchise has always been its colourful and often zany characters. Being pirates and inhabitants of the relatively secluded Caribbeans (during the age of the discovery of the New World) was apparently not enough character for the game designers, so they have invested in the characters of this game with additional oddball qualities. Some of them happen to be returning characters, but the new ones present themselves in a way that is no less hilarious than the series' recurrent individuals.

In addition to the main antagonist that is (none other than) LeChuck (again - only now in a different evil form), there are also secondary (disposable, one-off) villains that also appear to have become a hallmark of the series. These happen to play a role in the plot twists and sub-plots of the game. To describe them more would be to include spoilers, but it suffices for this reviewer to say that they are very effective at whatever story exposition that the writers had intended them to perform.

Unlike the previous Monkey Island games, this one has now embraced three-dimensional polygon-based graphics, instead of the usual graphical techniques of projecting 2-D sprites onto hand-drawn backgrounds to create an illusion of depth. The transition can be a bit jarring, as Guybrush and company hardly looks like they did in previous games. But then, this oddity also appeared to have occurred in previous games to a clear extent, where each subsequent entry in the franchise used sprites that merely resembles the ones used in the previous game. Nevertheless, the story-writing and dialogue scripts make certain that players are able to identify who is who.

The hand-drawn art may be somewhat gone, but using polygonal models had not diluted the game designers' talent for creating environments that the Monkey Island series has been known for: lush, tropical jungles filled with all manner of deadly (and zany) fauna and flora, pretty sandy beaches for characters to frolic on, and Colonial Era buildings that suggest the source of inspiration for the designers' design decisions.

Animations of said models are generally more than decent. Despite the simplicity of the human models, the facial expressions that they make can sometimes be priceless, though this reviewer has to opine that some others do come off flat (especially those that break the fourth wall). Other animations like exerted bodily movements, e.g. handing over items, are generally adequate, though of course, as always, it can be weird to watch characters pull out something large to give over to Guybrush, who nonchalantly stuff it into his very roomy pockets.

The graphics of the game ultimately takes the backseat behind its audio, which is the bigger source of entertainment in this game. This reviewer is of course referring to the stellar voice-acting in this game, which followed the tradition started in the fully-voiced third Monkey Island game. Every silly notion, joke and threat, among other discourses of speech, are delivered very well, or at the very least, getting the message across without sounding bland.

Non-dialogue sound effects are not as pervasive as voice-acting clips in this game, however. In fact, other than ambient noises (e.g. waves lapping on sea-shores, the calls of jungle animals), there is very little else that would be a source of sound in any particular area. However, where there are non-aesthetic sound effects that occur in an area, they do their job well, which is to attract the attention of the player. Coincidentally, these sound effects usually continue to emanate from someone or something that involves a puzzle until the solution to it is obtained. (There's no guarantee that the object concerned will not continue making noises though; the contrary occurs for some puzzles, wherever Guybrush's tendency to bungle up situations rears its ugly head.)

In conclusion, Escape from Monkey Island has made a jump from the sprite-based graphics of its predecessors to polygon-based models. Far from just catching onto a precarious ledge, this game has landed on a fertile plateau. While there was a long lapse in any entry to the Monkey Island franchise after this game, the new series from Telltale Games vindicated the choice of this migration of graphics - or at least just showed that graphics doesn't really matter where the Monkey Island series is concerned.