I’ve had a lot of positive things to say so far, but Secret of Monkey Island is not a perfect game. It was made just before Lucasarts figured out a lot of the conveniences you see in many adventure games today, and these problems become obvious when you’re not looking at the game from a nostalgic standpoint. First and foremost, the quality of the puzzles wildly ranges from being quite good, to just short of unacceptable. A few of them require you to make repeated trips from one place to another, and there are few ways to speed this up; you could lose a few minutes each way just going through areas you’ve already visited. Worse, it’s not always obvious where you should go... or that you have more options on where to send Guybrush than are immediately apparent. The game’s hint system helps a lot with this, thankfully.

There are also a few cases of timed puzzles where you must be very quick and precise in accomplishing your goal, which is very much at odds with how the genre is played today. This adds a lot of tedium to the game, though I know Lucasarts had no winning move in this regard; remove these bad design choices and those who fondly remembered the original would be upset for the ’unnecessary changes.’ Don’t fix it, and those more used to modern adventures will be annoyed. Lucasarts opted to leave most of these things as is, and that was probably the ’least wrong’ choice.

That said, there is definitely more good than bad here. The humor is pretty good, and this should last you about six or so hours. That isn’t a bad deal for a ten dollar game, especially one as historic as Secret of Monkey Island. Long-time fans have probably already bought the game regardless of my positive review, so I imagine I’m mostly speaking to the uninitiated here. And to that crowd, this remake of the classic does come recommended; it’s a decent game in its own right, ten dollars is a fair price, and it will offer some great context with the ongoing Tales of Monkey Island episodes.