NOCLIP Pocket E87 - Open Your Verbs - The Secret of Monkey Island

Describing The Skybox

That’s the stupidest podcast I’ve ever heard! Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about one of the all time classic point and click adventure games, The Secret of Monkey Island as our pocket episode for Simian September, the month that’s like Ape-ril, but in September. Monkey Island is notable for a number of reasons, but it releasing in 1990 means that it was one of the first hits in the genre to really take off and did a lot to popularize Adventure games. It also featured the lighthearted comedic tone that many adventure games, particularly the LucasArts games, would adopt for the rest of the genre’s time in the zeitgeist. That being said, the version of the game we’re playing today is the Special Edition, which infuriatingly came out 19 years later in 2009. This version has updated visuals, making the game look more like a cartoon than the original was able to given technological limitations and added voice acting, which makes the game a bit more accessible for modern audiences. Not so accessible as to make some of the puzzles easier to solve, but I don’t really think anyone expected that from a point and click from 1990. The actual gameplay is where the game shows its age most obviously, though not in the usual way for games of the genre. Monkey Island isn’t a long game, but it is pretty slow, with players needing to meticulously check for items, areas and zones throughout its few maps, but the puzzles never quite get into the outlandish cause and effect logic puzzles of other point and clicks. There is good and bad, but taken as product of its time, the game does surprisingly well, but may not hold up to modern scrutiny. We’re going to be talking about comedy and how the style of this game’s writing manages to make it feel pretty timeless, puzzle difficulty without resorting to pixel hunting or other less-than-logical designs, and we speculate how well fighting a robot fits in with the setting of this game. Thank you for joining us this week! We’re going through some tumultuous times currently, so only a couple episodes for this month, but Monkey Island has been on our list for a while and it’s good to finally have a place to put it. There are even a few proper monkeys in the game, too, so this was less of a stretch than we maybe originally thought. Are you, well, old, and played this game as a kid or around the time of its release, or were you, like us, someone who heard about it as a classic of the genre? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments. Next time, we’re entering into the scariest, spookiest month of the year and are going to be talking about Signalis, a game that has been recommended to us by nearly everyone we’ve ever met, so we hope you’ll join us then.