A review of The Secret Of Monkey Island
I first played this game many years ago, back on the Amiga A500 which was our family's first computer (which is where I discovered a love of computer games)
The copy I borrowed off a friend, unfortunately, crashed at a certain point so I could not even complete the first part.
Fast forward a couple of decades or so, and I see the remastered version on Steam. So I bought it. It was still another couple of years before I started playing it, but this time around, I was able to finish it! The remaster on Steam has the option of switching the graphics between their original low-res-ness, and the smoother remastered graphics, so I opted to keep the newer graphics, having seen plenty of the original style.
This is one of those classic point-and-click adventuire games where the majority of the puzzles actually have fairly logical solutions, especially if you also pay attention to what each character says when you talk to them. I only had to "cheat" and lookup a guide on 5 or 6 occasions, during the entirety of the game.
And it's a very enjoyable game, quite funny and I like the story. It's easy to see where the fondness for this game comes from, and it still holds up today, especially with the remastered/updated graphics.
It uses standard kind of point-and-click gameplay features - you have an inventory of items you find, which apparently is pretty much unlimited in size. Almost everything you find has some kind of use in at least one puzzle in the game. You can "look at" any item you have in your inventory, which sometimes can yield a clue as to where/when the item will be needed, but this is not always the case. And you have a selection of actions you can attempt - with items in your inventory, parts of the scenery, and other people. There are the occasional "cut scene" moments done within the game's engine, too.
The Secret Of Monkey Island also features a couple of "insult swordfights" which are sections of the game, the first one being where you keep encountering various pirates, and engaging them in a swordfight where your success (or failure, to begin with) hangs on your successful hurling of insults, and matching of the correct response to the insults your opponent hurls back. In each such encounter, it keeps going until you or your opponent makes too many mistakes/does not know enough responses. You have to keep at this for a little while, until you learn all of the standard insults and the appropriate response to each.
Once you have these, you have to take on a particularly tricikier opponent (the Sword Master) where you learn some new insults. Again, you need to learn the correct respopnse to each of these, before you can beat this tricikier opponent.
There are many other memorable scenes/puzzles you encounter during this game - carefully transferring some corrosive grog from tankard to tankard as you run with it to free a prisoner, the first time you get into the governor's mansion and the game takes over control for a bit, with most of the action hidden behind a wall (but you can still see the text of the various actions and results), and using a living, severed head to guide you through a maze of caves, to name a few.
Overall I rate this game 5/5 - the puzzles are mostly pretty logical, and to me the humour still works. Definitely a classic and worth checking out if it was released before your time!
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