It has been a while since one of the oldest series in gaming industry made a surprise return with a new title. Return To Monkey Island has been announced yesterday, and development of the project will be led by the creator of the series Ron Gilbert. Fun fact is that Gilbert actually revealed the game on April 1, but no one seemed to take it seriously as people thought it was an April’s Fools joke. As it turns out the joke was on everyone, and this announcement turned out to be pretty much real.
The game is mentioned as a sequel to the first two games of the series, The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. The sequels that followed, named The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island were made without Gilbert. Gilbert was also fairly straightforward about his dislike for those titles. So he is literally coming back to do things “his own way”.
The trailer runs for less than a minute but it’s message is very clear. We see the talking skull head, Skull Murray, get kicked right into the water by another skeleton playing a violin. Skull Murray was created after Gilbert from the studio to create his own, and this sequence represents the latter half of the franchise being “dissed” with no holds barred. Only known information regarding the release is that it will happen sometime in 2022, and Devolver Digital will be the publisher.