In the Scum Bar Nothing good ever cooks up on Melee Island. Precisely for this reason we are so eager to cross the door again. Ron Gilbert offers a new sub-minute preview of Return to Monkey Island on the eve of Gamescom 2022. A small taste of the game, of course, that genuinely conveys the same sensations of the classic The Secret of Monkey Island.
In fact, in almost 40 seconds we are shown a lot of things, starting with the complete visual redesign of the bar and the characters in the game. Gilbert ruled out the use of pixelart and the aesthetics of The Escape from Monkey Island, and despite the fact that this divided opinions, it will be the puzzles and the dialogues that will serve to see if it lives up to the classics.
Another aspect to highlight is the sound. On the one hand, Guybrush recovers the voice of Dominic Armato, who has played the character since The Curse of Monkey Island. In addition, the music will have an environmental effect depending on our position in the bar: if we are at the entrance, the melody of a tavern will sound, but when we stand in front of the pirate leaders it will change the tone of the music and gain strength and nuances.
No less interesting is the use of the cursor and the interface, which is subtly different from that seen in other dialogue scenes and makes our actions on the screen more visible. Return to Monkey Island does not use the SCUMM language of the two classic deliveries, but Dinky, which was used in Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure.
One last detail that is not seen in the video: since last week we already know LeChuck’s new voice: Jess Harnell will scream as the fearsome pirate ghost after being the English voice of Capitanazo in The House of the drawings and Wakko Warner in animaniacs. And it’s not bad at all.
The bad new? As far as we know, and judging by the Steam page, the 13,000 lines of dialogue in Return to Monkey Island will be heard only in English, although the texts will be translated into 10 languages, including “Spanish from Spain“.
Return to Monkey Island It will arrive this year on PC and Nintendo Switch. We know that it will be present at the Gamescom opening gala and, we are not going to lie to you, at this point in the game we are losing the hype and we are counting on Devolver and Lucasfilm Games to set a release date for it. If possible, for yesterday.