Escape from Monkey Island

Escape from Monkey Island closed out the original quartet of pirate adventures from LucasArts and was the first entry in the series to take place fully in three dimensions. Guybrush Threepwood returns with Elaine from their honeymoon on Melee Island to find his mansion slated for demolition, Elaine's governorship abolished, and the islands in the sights of a businessman named Ozzie Mandrill who wants to turn the Caribbean into a tourist attraction. The path to setting things right runs through several islands, a court hearing, an airship duel, and the return of familiar faces from earlier entries.

The game runs on the GrimE engine, the same foundation as Grim Fandango: polygonal characters move across pre-rendered backgrounds and are controlled directly from the keyboard. That control scheme was the most common complaint, since it feels clumsy in tight spaces and the game resisted mouse control. The puzzles keep to the series' tradition, built on combinatorics that's absurd yet logical in hindsight; instead of insult swordfighting, the game introduces so-called Monkey Kombat, a duel of memorized sounds and stances that the player has to painstakingly learn, and which remains one of the most debated elements of the game. Technically it was a Windows title that already assumed a 3D accelerator and offered a free camera along with lit cutscenes.

Visually the game sticks to the series' cartoonish style, but the three-dimensional characters don't reach the expressiveness of the hand-drawn art from the previous installment, and some players also took issue with the coarser facial models. The voice acting stayed at a high level, the humor works, and the Caribbean music returns in arrangements that build on earlier entries. Reviews were mostly positive, though cooler than for the third game, and to this day it splits the series' fans into two camps: one sees it as the last proper old-school episode, the other as the first step in the wrong direction. Even so, it's an honest farewell to the classic LucasArts era and a reminder of a time when adventure games still had budgets for full production.