Return to Monkey Island Creators Discuss Puzzle Design for the Modern Age
That Return to Monkey Island is happening at all is a game industry modern miracle unto itself. In the three decades since Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman last made a Monkey Island game together, the point-and-click adventure game genre has soared, been left for dead, and eventually been resurrected. When Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge was busy stumping players with “monkey wrench” puzzles, hint lines were still an actual thing, because online wikis, walkthroughs, and hint guides were still in their infancy, along with the Internet itself. I spoke with Gilbert and Grossman ahead of Return to Monkey Island’s release next week to discuss how puzzle making has – and hasn’t – changed since the duo last left wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood.
“There was a different sensibility for puzzles back then,” Gilbert said. “We were new and puzzles were new and adventure games were new. I don’t think the rules had really been established. [And] the audience was quite different back then.” And so, when designing 2022’s Return to Monkey Island, the two designers’ approach has evolved right along with the audience they’re creating the game for. “You still want to have fun, challenging, rewarding puzzles, but I think people have no tolerance for frustration anymore,” Gilbert began. “I think people have so much pulling on them, media-wise, from television shows to movies to games. When the original Monkey Island came out, there were probably ten games or five games that were released at the same time. Now there are 500. They want to play, [but] they don’t want any frustration.”
And so, Gilbert continued, “you still want to give them a challenging experience. You don’t want to give them an experience where they just click through the thing. But you want to build puzzles that are more logical, that make sense. You want when somebody solves a puzzle or will accept a hint for a puzzle that they go, ‘Oh, I should’ve thought of that.’ You don’t want them to go, ‘I never would have thought of that.’ And so I think that’s the main thing Dave and I are really trying to do with the puzzles is make sure that everything makes logical sense for the game.”
“
“I think a lot of that has to do with being clear,” Grossman added. “Clear about what the goals are and what the tools do. We didn’t always used to be good at that.” When asked to elaborate, he said, “There are a couple that are based on wordplay or idioms that don’t translate well for everybody. That monkey wrench puzzle comes to mind.”
Gilbert continued this conversation topic, his voice taking on a very humble, self-reflective tone: “I think you want to challenge the audience but you want to challenge them in a fair way. You don’t want to challenge them because you’ve made things obscure…I have talked to people who’ve played Monkey Island 1 or 2 for the first time recently, and they really do just complain about the puzzles. It’s the one thing that they complain about. It’s not that there are puzzles, that they’re challenging puzzles, but that they make no sense because they’re really not laid out. And for people that are huge MI fans, sometimes that’s hard to understand because they’re so seeped in what MI is that they don’t remember that something can be super confusing. I don’t want games to be mind numbingly difficult for players. I want them to enjoy the game and enjoy the story.”
“
To that end, Return to Monkey Island will also see the (ahem) return of Monkey Island Lite, known here as Casual Mode. So would that version of the game be “too easy” on purpose? How easy are they aiming for? “I don’t think either of us worried about Monkey Island Lite being too easy,” Gilbert said. “I think the people who are playing Casual Mode probably have very little experience with puzzle solving to begin with or they’re just interested in the story. We don’t dumb it down or make it so easy that they just click through the game, but I’m not as concerned about it being too easy.” Added Grossman, “Sometimes [Casual Mode] gets its own puzzle. It’s not just a question of, ‘Oh, we went through with a hatchet one day and cut out stuff.’ We actually put a lot of time into the two versions…So we were really making two games for a little while.”
Ultimately, Gilbert and Grossman hope to make an enjoyable game that pairs perfectly with the original two – particularly since Return starts just after LeChuck’s Revenge ends. “The story of this one is more closely related to the stories of the first two than anything that’s been made since,” Grossman said. “Generally it’s all canon,” Gilbert said of the other Monkey Island games, referencing Curse, Escape, and Tales. “There are some pieces of canon that don’t fit with what we’re doing. And I think Dave’s rule was, ‘If the canon fits we’ll use it, and if it doesn’t, we’ll just kind of ignore it.’ We’re not going to diss on it. We’re not doing anything to poke at the canon that doesn’t particularly fit our story. But we’ll just kind of slide around stuff.”
“We don’t want facts to get in the way of telling a good story,” Grossman said with a laugh. “Especially when those are fictional facts and not actual facts.”
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
