One of the greatest point ‘n’ click series is finally back. Devolver Digital, Lucasfilm Games, and Terrible Toybox announced Return to Monkey Island today, the sixth installment of the classic franchise centered around the adventures of pirate Guybrush Threepwood and his battles against his arch-nemesis, LeChuck, an evil, undead pirate.
Return to Monkey Island will serve as a direct sequel to 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, but what’s really neat is that original writer-director Ron Gilbert is back, along with original co-writer Dave Grossman, and LucasArts composers Michael Land, Michael McConnell and Clint Bajakian. A teaser trailer has promised that the game will be released this year.
Return to Monkey Island Is a New Sequel Coming from the Original Director (IGN)
We don’t have any more information on the game than what’s included in the short teaser trailer above, but we do have a 2013 blog post from Gilbert in which he laid out his ideas for a new game in the series. At that time, he said he’d want it to be “a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2”, and would specifically ignore the events of every game in the series after the second – and given this game follows LeChuck’s Revenge, it seems he may have gotten his wish.
His other ideas at the the time included making it “a hardcore adventure game” with no tutorials, hint systems, “pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing.” On top of that, he wanted retro art but powered by modern hardware (to help the team do what Lucasarts couldn’t in the 1990s), a “full-on inventory”, a physical release, dialog puzzles, and no verbs used for commands. He also said he’d like to rebuild the originals’ SCUMM engine, among other points.