Return to Monkey Island

Return to Monkey Island is the sequel to Guybrush's story that fans waited twenty years for – and, more importantly, from the creator who invented the series back in 1990. Ron Gilbert was behind the first two entries, then left the series for many years, and made Return to Monkey Island as a direct continuation of the second game, LeChuck's Revenge, treating everything the series offered between the third and fourth entries under other creators as a side branch. The controls stay true to the classic point-and-click style: an inventory, item combinations, and dialogue with multiple-choice responses, this time split into individual chapters instead of one open world, and rendered in a new, hand-drawn visual style with bold outlines.

The 2022 game was made at Terrible Toybox, the studio Gilbert founded together with other genre veterans, and was published by Devolver Digital simultaneously on PC and Nintendo Switch – other platforms followed only about a year after release. The story answers a question fans have been asking since the nineties, namely what actually happened to the legendary treasure Big Whoop, while also poking fun at itself and its own status as a genre icon, including memories of how divisively audiences once received the ending of the second game. The simplified, flat visual style with simple shapes and bold colors split fans on release, but the humor and pacing of the classic entries remain unchanged. In both story and chapter structure, Gilbert also deliberately returns to the rhythm of his own first two games, and builds many of the supporting characters and locations as direct echoes of LeChuck's Revenge specifically, rather than the series' later entries.

Why play it: Return to Monkey Island is a must for anyone who played the first two games and wanted to know how their story truly ends, as well as for newcomers who want to try the adventure genre in a modern, easy-to-follow form.