Review of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition by emric

I thoroughly enjoyed playing this remake of Lucasarts’ classic adventure ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’. A wonderfully nostalgic experience. Playing it now as a more analytical adult, I was able to appreciate just how well designed & written this game really is. Very few modern adventure games come close to this kind of quality. So it’s good that in the remake Lucasarts kept all the puzzles, screens and dialogue unchanged. But they’ve enhanced the experience with perfectly cast recorded voices, fully re-recorded live music, gorgeous HD painted backgrounds, a fantastically updated interface and a useful hint system. The best feature though is the ability to “hotswap” at any time to and from the original version of the game!!

If I was to do a little nitpicking tho, they did cut a few corners: character close-ups had no mouth movement when they spoke; the walk animation cycle for all characters was too “floaty”; 3D character designs fall just short of blending nicely with the painted backgrounds; visual effects for water, lava and ghost movement are admittedly pretty, but look more like an iTunes visualiser than something fitting into the visual style of the game. It also would’ve been nice if there’d been an option to hotswap to the classic version but still hear the new voices and music.

None of these shortcomings seriously affected my enjoyment of the game tho.  All the awesomeness is still firmly there!

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Time Played: 10-20 hours