Only to find that, no, it really does just suck. In spite of its reputation I wasn’t expecting Escape to be that bad, just incredibly underwhelming, and gave it the fairest go I possibly could. Sure, the discourse turned against it during the subsequent decades and I had my opinion partially poisoned by groupthink that it was actually a disaster of a game, but set against that is… well, I have played some real fucking stinkers as part of this series, and also Chinatown Detective Agency earlier this year, so my scale for what constitutes a truly crap adventure game has been appropriately recalibrated.
I have played through Escape exactly once, when it first came out in 2000, and while I thought it was incredibly average in comparison to Curse and there were some bits that seemed spectacularly idiotic even to 16-year-old me (like Monkey Kombat), I didn’t hate it. It’s not like I didn’t go into it with an open mind. Escape feels like the most expensive Monkey Island fan game ever made, and while I don’t have the phrase “fan game” down in my lexicon as a pure pejorative, when I apply it to a product made by the professionals at LucasArts, the supposed masters of the adventure game genre, I definitely mean it as one.
I am not entirely sure what was going on with the personnel situation at LucasArts while it was being made, but the feeling I get when playing it is the same one I experienced when playing Mass Effect Andromeda, or the single-player campaign of Halo Infinite, where the teams responsible for the original classics had long since moved on and their replacements were trying to put together a sort of cargo-cult copy without understanding how or why anything in the originals worked. Escape From Monkey Island, while not exactly plumbing the same depths as the truly awful LucasArts adventures like Zak McKraken and Fate of Atlantis, still does not make itself a particularly easy game to like, or to play.
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