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

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.