Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island review

• Reviews by Richard Hoover
• Published:

Crossover DLC plunders more than enough nostalgic elements

What would happen if Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood became the most renowned and mightiest pirate that he imagined himself to be? That’s the question that Rare set out to answer with The Legend of Monkey Island “Tall Tales” introduced into their semi-sandbox pirate game Sea of Thieves. These story-driven DLC expansion chapters see a return to both Mêlée and Monkey Islands, now beautifully realized in 3D, along with classic characters from the original Secret of Monkey Island. While adventure game newcomers may find certain aspects of Sea of Thieves itself to be clunky, once into the three-part adventure story, that’s exactly what it is: another adventure in the lives of Guybrush and Elaine Marley and the death of LeChuck. While the wit may not be as sharp as the classic games, the story and puzzles are pleasant homages to the beloved LucasArts series that inspired them.

Sea of Thieves had been on my list of games to play for some time (I do like a good pirate tale), but it took the incorporation of Guybrush himself to finally make me get into it. I had no clue how to play, but I really wanted to revisit that Monkey Island goodness. Fortunately the base game comes with a tutorial to help new players get used to its mechanics, because The Legend of Monkey Island operates very differently from the rest. In Sea of Thieves proper, up to four players can form a crew and then sail around doing whatever buccaneering stuff they like in a pseudo-sandbox pirate simulator environment. The Legend of Monkey Island, by contrast, plays much more like a traditional first-person adventure, with puzzles to solve, an inventory of items to use, and dialog trees for conversing with other characters.

Even though Legend plays as a fairly typical 3D adventure, you will definitely want to complete the tutorial first, especially if you’re similarly new to Sea of Thieves. Movement and basic interactions are typical of first-person games, but the inventory system involves a series of wheels of items and is cumbersome to navigate, to say the least. It’s also important to know what’s in this inventory, as in addition to Legend-specific items, you’ll have to use regular Sea of Thieves items like the shovel, compass, torch, and fishing pole.

The tutorial is also useful for learning how to manage a ship. You can’t simply jump directly to the Monkey Island content. Instead, when the main game starts, you are placed on an island in the titular sea of thieves and have to helm your ship through a mystical portal that then jumps into the Monkey Island content. This means you need to know the basics of raising and lowering your ship’s sails and anchor, and steering the vessel successfully without wrecking it on the rocks that surround the portal. Captaining skills also come in useful in the third episode of The Legend of Monkey Island, where a chase scene occurs.

When embarking on your pirate life, you and up to three other people can play together, but really the Monkey Island stuff works fine solo. You are initially deposited on a normal Sea of Thieves island, where you encounter Captain Kate Capsize from Monkey Island 2. She’s out for some payback against Guybrush after the LeChuck’s Revenge fiasco, but Guybrush has been lured into the Sea of the Damned by none other than LeChuck himself and placed under some hideous voodoo spell. Kate needs you to go in and rescue Guybrush so she can “introduce [her] fist to his teeth.” From Kate you can choose one of three books that correspond to the three episodes of the story. Doing so opens a mystical portal a little ways offshore; sailing through the opening starts that particular installment.

Beyond its respective portal, each episode begins with an introductory sequence involving some other character, such as Guybrush or LeChuck, sailing by on their own ship spouting exposition to set the stage. It’s here that I learned this game is set between The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island, as Guybrush and Elaine have just set off on their honeymoon following their marriage. Unfortunately they take a wrong turn and end up in the Sea of the Damned, where LeChuck curses Guybrush in a most unusual way. Unlike a cutscene, these narrative intros leave you in control, free to move around your own ship, although not to sail it as the boat follows a scripted course. Even though there’s free movement, there’s nothing to do except listen to the plot being explained, which goes on for several minutes. Eventually, though, the ship sails into port, where you do have to ensure it stops before it wrecks.

The first time I sailed into Mêlée Island was quite something. Initially it’s viewed through a fog, so only its silhouette can be seen. Then the mists part, the Monkey Island main theme kicks in, and there’s Mêlée, looking like it could have been taken right out of Secret to Monkey Island (albeit in high resolution rather than pixel art). This unveiling was a visual treat, and the different episodes all have similarly spectacular moments peppered throughout.

Once ashore, players familiar with the classic games will feel right at home. All the old haunts are here, ranging from the Scumm Bar, the voodoo lady’s shop, the governor’s mansion, Stan’s used ship emporium, and the Fantastic Flying Fettucini Brothers Circus on Mêlée, to the impassable chasm, Herman Toothrot’s volcano-side shack, and the great monkey head on Monkey Island. They’re all well-realized and have made an impressive transition from the original 2D artwork to their 3D representations. That said, these sites can sometimes be quite far apart, as the entirety of both Mêlée and Monkey Island have been modelled. This can make for some rather long treks from one place to another, especially when you have to climb all the zigzagging switchbacks to the lookout point at the top of Mêlée Island.

After arriving on Mêlée, a trip to the Scumm Bar sets the stage for the terrible fate that has befallen Guybrush. He is now… the legend of Monkey Island, the mightiest, most fearsome pirate to ever sail the seas, and the governor of Mêlée Island to boot. Every pirate, including the trio of important-looking ones in the back room of the bar, are in awe of Guybrush. In fact, most pirates have given up actual pirating because they know they can never measure up to Threepwood. As you investigate further, the nature of the curse LeChuck has cast upon Guybrush becomes clear. All this success is really just Guybrush living out his own fantasy of being a mighty pirate and writing his memoirs for future generations. So dedicated to this project is Guybrush that he’s stopped sailing the high seas. The curse somehow extends to the residents of the island, who are all enthralled and excited to have the great Guybrush Threepwood presiding over them. All this keeps the pirates out of the way, allowing LeChuck to further his own goals without interference.

The first episode is spent trying to arrange a meeting with Governor Guybrush to hopefully break the voodoo spell on him. This part of the story is confined to the town of Mêlée, with the rest of the island opening up in the second episode, and then, with Guybrush back in possession of his wits, a trip to fabled Monkey Island in the third part to confront LeChuck. Throughout all this are puzzles that pay homage to the ones from The Secret of Monkey Island, which undoubtedly makes them easier to solve for fans of the original game. For example, the piranha poodles make a return, but instead of cooking up something in the Scumm Bar kitchen to knock them out, you’ll need to whip up a recipe to make them more ferocious.

Puzzles are generally quite straightforward, so don’t expect anywhere near the difficulty of the earlier Monkey Island games. In fact, the most challenging aspects of the puzzles here tend to arise from weak design choices like a lack of feedback for wrong interactions. For example, at one point I had to operate a winch but its load was too heavy at the other end. The winch showed up as an interactive point, but it made no sound and showed no trembling animation to hint that something was amiss. It literally did nothing. Then too, you’ll have to contend with the inventory. Even though you can carry all of the Sea of Thieves tools, which consist of a sword, a pistol, various pirate implements like a shovel and fishing rod, and a whole band of musical instruments crammed down your pants, you can only carry one item that’s custom to The Legend of Monkey Island at a time. This gets to be especially annoying in the third part, where you’re trekking all over Monkey Island trying to figure out which items go with which widely spaced puzzles.

Sea of Thieves itself has a fair amount of action, and some of that has bled over into the Legend tales. The first episode culminates in a first-person shootout with several waves of LeChuck’s ghostly minions, armed only with a bottle of spirit banishing root beer. The second episode has you perform a high-wire platforming sequence at the Fettucini brothers’ circus. It also drops you into several bouts of swordfighting, where you must still use insults to win – though these insults aren’t nearly as inventive and funny as the originals. That part is handled by a dialog tree, but between insults you need to get the timing down to both attack and parry with your sword.

The third episode places you on a ship in pursuit of LeChuck beneath Monkey Island. Here’s where knowing how to operate your vessel comes into play, as not only must you navigate narrow tunnels, but once you catch up to the ghost pirate in an underground grotto, you must partake in ship-to-ship combat, with Guybrush and Elaine firing cannons as you struggle to keep your ship within firing distance. (In solo mode, the combat is handled automatically.) As far as I can tell, you can’t wreck your vessel or have LeChuck sink it, but you do need a bit of a deft hand as there’s not much maneuvering room here. The final installment also sees a return to insult swordfighting, this time with LeChuck. (Kudos for that as I realized that the closest LeChuck ever got to partaking in insult swordfighting before this was the interminable Monkey Kombat at the end of Escape from Monkey Island.)

Completing all three episodes took me 17 hours all told. However, I offer two caveats to the play time. First, given the size of the islands, much of that time was consumed by simply running from one place to another (thank goodness for the chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle ziplines on Monkey Island that allow some of the longer stretches to be covered much more quickly). And secondly, the “save system” is absolutely atrocious, which significantly increases the duration, though not in a good way.

The Legend of Monkey Island uses a checkpoint save system, but checkpoints are few and far between, activating only after you’ve accomplished a major task. You can probably count the number of save points per episode on one hand with fingers to spare. Even then, if you hit a checkpoint and quit the game, when you come back you have to repeat the whole loading of the game, starting in the sea of thieves, rushing out to your ship (if you have one of the Tall Tales in progress, at least you don’t have to return to Kate Capsize), weighing anchor, sailing through the portal, watching the whole unskippable intro for that episode, and setting into port. Doing all of this requires no less than five menus just to get into the game, and then eight to ten minutes, depending on the length of the episode intro, to actually get to Mêlée or Monkey Island in order to finally resume playing.

To illustrate just one example, in the first part you have to get the clock tower working again, which involves quite a bit of running back and forth through the town. This, in turn, offers up avenues of exploration for other puzzles to sift through to determine what applies to the clock tower. If you stop along the way to chat to the island’s residents – the patrons of the bar, the map seller on the corner, the three men of low moral fiber, the shopkeeper, Otis in the jail, and several ghost pirates – you can easily spend three hours or more trying to get just that one puzzle done. If you quit the game before finishing the clock tower puzzle, you do not hit the checkpoint, you do not get any sort of save, and you’re not left in a place where you can pick up again when you come back; you simply lose all of that progress. Even if you reach the checkpoint, it only remembers the progress for that particular puzzle and anything you’ve already completed. Any other puzzles underway but not yet completed have to be redone from the very beginning. Ideally, you’ll want to plan for a four- to five-hour stretch for a given episode in order to play it through in its entirety.

While The Legend of Monkey Island doesn’t have a cast list of credits, there’s no mistaking the familiar voice talents of Dominic Armato as Guybrush and Denny Delk as Murray the demonic talking skull. Although the script isn’t especially funny, these two in particular continue to voice their characters so wonderfully that their delivery alone is worth a few chuckles. I especially got a kick out of Murray badmouthing me during my early feeble attempts at swordfighting. The rest of the voice cast does an excellent job as well, especially whoever plays LeChuck now that the late great Earl Boen has left us.

It’s also welcome to see all the recurring characters. A few of them, like Kate Capsize, look quite close to their 2D counterparts. Others look a bit more like generic Sea of Thieves characters with their weirdly slab-like and chunky features, which have been tweaked to be recognizable as characters from The Secret of Monkey Island when they appear in their customary haunts. Guybrush himself falls into this latter camp. Given how much we see of him in the adventure games, his appearance feels the most different of any of the characters. Then again, his appearance always seems to change from one game to another, so perhaps it’s very much in keeping with that tradition. It’s not much of a distraction in any case, as this is really your adventure. Guybrush himself appears surprisingly little, going so far as to have him out of commission for almost the entirety of the second part.

While his looks may have changed, Guybrush is still the same goofy pirate wannabe we’ve always known. He has that peculiar blend of obliviousness combined with moments of rare insight that works so well for him. His imagined elevation to the status of Legend of Monkey Island feels perfectly handled for his character, evoking the almost boastful pride he had in Escape from Monkey Island when he’d refer to that titular event. While his voodoo-induced dream lasts, he’s reclusive, a diva, and has little time for fans or autograph seekers, as he’s sequestered away in the governor’s mansion writing his memoirs. Once snapped back to reality, though, he’s immediately back on board with stopping his long-standing adversary and with reuniting with Elaine.

Final Verdict

Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island is perhaps best described as “Monkey lite” with a lot of filler wandering from one place to another. It has some truly impressive sights, and its excellent voice acting will bring a smile to your face and even the occasional chuckle, though not so funny that milk comes out your nose. When the Sea of Thieves aspects aren’t getting in the way, there’s quite a fun little game in here that honours the Monkey Island franchise’s past, even if it doesn’t chart much of a new course of its own. This is definitely content for existing fans of the series, for whom nostalgia will surely provide enough of that undefinable charm to enjoy. Anyone not vested in the franchise may find some enjoyment in its pirate antics, but will likely be left wondering just what all the fuss is about. But, hey, at least you’d have the entire rest of Sea of Thieves to explore as well.

Richard played his own copy of Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island on PC.

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