Escape From Monkey Island Preview

There is no doubt that the adventure game genre has seen better times. The "long-passed" early '90s were its prime time, when Lucasarts released such marvels as Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hits the Road, Full Throttle and the beginning of the unforgettable Monkey Island series. Once in a while though, another great adventure game sees the light. Like now - the great title The Longest Journey finally hits the American market. On top of that, almost a decade after its first prequel comes the fourth and final instalment in the Monkey Island series! Read on as we check out the recently released demo of Escape from Monkey Island.

Tested and written by Anders "Twilight" Steinlein, published 12th October 2000

Let me give you a quick summary of the story of the game, even though you may have read it about a zillion times before. The game takes place a few months after the previous game in the series, The Curse of Monkey Island. Guybrush Threepwood is now married to Governor Elaine Marley, and after three months of honeymooning in the Caribbean they find things a bit on the odd side when they return to Melee Island. The city hall has declared Elaine officially dead, and some crazy (and damn funny) pirate is catapulting boulders at her mansion (well, trying to anyway). Secondly, some Australian businessman has been buying up land all over the island. If that wasn't enough, a Charles L. Charles is running for governor. Guess who that is...

Firing up the huge demo presented me to the intro I struggled so hard to download. As expected, it was damn funny. It gave me a funny summary of the earlier happenings, and what have happened since the last instalment in the series. I was a bit disappointed in the graphical quality of the intro though, but more about that in a little while. The exceptional humour of designers Sean Clarke and Mike Stemmle (the men behind Sam & Max Hits the Road, among others) became even more obvious when I met the mentioned catapult-pirate. I almost laughed my ass of as he continually calibrated the catapult only to miss again, again and again. "Hmmmm… Let's tryyy... FIRE!" No Monkey Island game could exist without jokes, so I was pleased to know the humour is still intact.

MI4 features an improved version of Grim Fandango's GRIME engine. This means a true 3D-enviroment and a keyboard-controlled Guybrush. Instead of pointing at objects with your mouse, Guybrush turns his head towards objects of interest when you walk past them. In addition to that, text is also printed in the bottom of the screen. This was quite confusing at first, but I found myself enjoying it after some getting used to. Not a significant step-up from Grim Fandango though... A more welcomed improvement is the new inventory. Your possessions are presented like a circle, and you rotate them to select the desired item. This opens up for the possibility to combine items, a feature not supported in GF's inventory system.

Speaking of the GRIME engine, the most significant change from previous Monkey Island games is the transaction from 2D to 3D. Giving you the option to choose between OpenGL and Direct3D, it looked quite good. The scenes in the demo were a bit too dark for my taste, but the "cartoonish" feel that resembles the series so well is happily kept intact. I was a bit disappointed not being able to change resolution though, as the standard one resulted in huge jaggies. FSAA will definitely become a welcomed feature while you're playing this game... As far as the sound goes, the voice actors are excellent as always. Simply excellent. The music from the trio behind many other Lucasarts titles also sounded very good indeed, but there were too little variation in the demo to tell for sure. I think we're in for yet another great soundtrack though.

I was very pleased to once again get to meet Guybrush and the gang. The staggering gameplay and humour we have come to know so well over the previous games are still intact. The move to a 3D engine seems to have gone relatively smooth, and I was happy to see that the cartoon-like graphics managed the leap quite well. I look forward to more light and colourful scenes in the full game. The audio sounded as good as we have come to expect from Lucasarts as well. If the full game is just a little of what this demo was, this is going to be a great addition to the already excellent series. This might just be the game the genre needs.

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