The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

I finished it! Okay, truth be told, I got slightly impatient and stuck in places, and ended up using hints to get me through for some things (which felt slightly obscure to me, but may have just been me being tired). Either way, I finished it, and playing through it has given me some very definite ideas on how to build my own point-and-click games.

I liked the exploration elements, and trying to find things on the world map was, for the most part, fun. I struggled slightly with the Monkey Island map, purely because the areas you could go to were not very clearly marked, which meant I missed some locations entirely until I googled for help. In particular, that monkey that you feed bananas to so he'll follow you? I had no idea he was there.

Related to that is the general art style. I will admit, it was lovely to look at. The graphics were very nicely done. Except, you know, that the graphics were so nicely done it was particularly difficult to figure out what I could click on. Granted, I played it on the iPad, so I didn't have a cursor to scan over things and see what could be clicked. The result of that was that I spent a good amount of time randomly tapping the screen just to see what I could interact with, and I still missed a lot. I think a big difference could have been made if there had been some way to see what objects are scenery, and what objects can be interacted with.

My final issue comes down to the sheer number of actions you can do. The entire bottom strip of the screen is devoted entirely to actions. I discovered that of the ten icons at the bottom of the screen, I used four regularly. Some I used only a couple times when a puzzle required it, such as the push/pull and speak actions. Some I never, ever used at all (open / close, I'm looking at you!). I know some of this is down to the age of the game, and at the time of its release, that kind of gameplay was not unusual. However, since everything else in the game has been updated, I can't help but feel it could have done with a bit of a cut down. A majority of the action buttons could have easily been reduced into a single "interact" action icon.

Even with those points in mind, Monkey Island is a good game. It's a classic in the point and click genre of games, and I would be foolish not to take some inspiration from it.