The Secret of Monkey Island

North American box art.

The Secret of Monkey Island, known in Japan as モンキー・アイランド ユーレイ海賊大騒動！, is an adventure game created by Lucasfilm Games and released for DOS in 1990. It is the first in a series of Monkey Island games and uses the using the popular SCUMM engine.

I first saw this game at a friend's house. He had the LucasArts adventure box set and went through several of the games pretty quickly, so I never got a chance to play it. Hearing more and more about the series over the years, I finally decided to play it around 2015.

Status

I do not own the game, but I have beaten it, though I required occasional hints.

Review

• Overall: 5/10
• Best Version: DOS VGA remake?

Good

• The script is pretty hilarious, lots of funny dialog options.
• The graphics are quite beautiful, even in the EGA version.

Bad

• You're unable to choose a lot of the dialog options because the game cuts-short a lot of conversations. The only way to read these options is to keep reloading the game.
• Like many adventure games, some of the puzzles are particularly difficult to solve and don't make much sense. I can attribute this to trying to pad the length of the game, trying to sell hint books, or laziness from the developers. Either case is annoying.
• Several parts of the game are just too silly and ruin the experience (but only temporarily).

Ugly

• Nothing really, this game is pretty solid.

Documentation

• 

  Game manual.

Gallery

• 

  EGA screenshot.

• 

  Fan art.

Links

• mobygames.com/game/secret-of-monkey-island - MobyGames.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island - Wikipedia.
• gamefaqs.com/pc/562681-the-secret-of-monkey-island - GameFAQS.