I’ve said several times before — to anyone who will listen, with or without their consent — that the demo plus first “Meanwhile…” cut-scene in The Secret of Monkey Island is what made me want to work in video games. Playing Sam & Max Hit the Road is what made me feel like I “belonged” at LucasArts and had to work there someday. And almost immediately after finishing Full Throttle, I decided I had to apply for a job no matter what.
But if I had to pick one of the adventure games as my favorite, I always thought it was Monkey Island 2. Its pixel-painterly backgrounds have a style that’s been unmatched in any other game1Although Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis comes awfully close., and it felt more endlessly expansive than anything I’d seen or played up to that point — there seemed to be no shortage of new, evocative locations. And up until the end, it felt like I was in sync with the game; it was setting up jokes and giving me tools to deliver the punchlines.
Now, though, I’m realizing that I don’t have any desire at all to revisit it. I tried playing the remastered version for a bit a few years ago, but there wasn’t much “magic” left in it for me, and I didn’t get very far before losing interest completely. I’m sure that much of that is due to over-familiarity, and I’d be happier with my memory of playing it than actually playing it again.
But more than that, I think that the feeling I had of set-ups and punchlines was surpassed several times over by Day of the Tentacle. That’s the entire game, after all. The initial storytelling does its thing pretty quickly and then gets out of the way, leaving you with a long chain of setups and payoffs. It feels much smaller in scope than Monkey Island 1 or 2, but what you lose in exploration is instead spent directly engaging with the game, looking for connections and predicting the solutions to puzzles.
It’s really a masterpiece of adventure game puzzle design. In my opinion, the gold standard of adventure game design is giving the player the feeling that they’re actively telling the story, instead of triggering moments of passive storytelling. So many of the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle are just setting up a gag or a piece of slapstick, rewarding you for being able to predict the punchline of the gag, and giving you the tools to make it play out yourself.
As for whether I’d like to play it again, or just be content with my perfect memory of it, I can’t really say. I will say that every attempt to add to it has left me cold. It was one of the first (maybe the first?) of the SCUMM games to be released on CD, and I played the “non-talkie” version of it on floppy disks. I remember that a while after I’d finished it, a friend called me to ask for help getting through some of the puzzles. At one point I told him to take an item and put it in the Chron-o-John. I heard a toilet flushing from over the phone and asked him what the hell was going on; I’d never heard the voices or sound effects. I did play the “improved” version later on, and I have to say it left me cold. The voices were all fine and performed well, but I’d already spent hours with the characters, and the voices didn’t match the ones in my head.
Also, while looking for a screenshot for this post, I kept finding images of the remastered version instead of the original. It actually surprised me how much I dislike them. I’m not typically precious about pixel art in the slightest2Unless it’s on an original black-and-white Macintosh, in which case it’s sacrosanct, but there’s just so much charm in the original art that’s completely lost in the attempt to make it smoother and higher detail. Even more than the Monkey Island 2 backgrounds, the process of translating analog art into lower-resolution pixel versions ended up creating a visual style that’s inseparable from the games that made me want to get into video games in the first place.