Return to Monkey Island

Some franchises carry a specific piece of unfinished business for thirty years, and Monkey Island carries one very specific piece: the ending of Monkey Island 2, which creator Ron Gilbert left deliberately ambiguous and divisive in 1991, and which fans have argued about ever since. Return to Monkey Island is Gilbert's first hands-on return to the series since that game, and its review corpus makes clear, in remarkable detail, that history essentially repeated itself.

A genuine, well-crafted return

The reception is warm by a wide margin — 89.6% positive across 5,240 English reviews — and the things reviewers praise are specific rather than generic. Dominic Armato's voice performance as Guybrush Threepwood and Michael Land's score both draw close to unanimous approval regardless of a review's overall verdict; even reviewers who dislike large parts of the game routinely carve out space to say the music and voice work are as good as, or better than, the series has ever managed. "I laughed a bunch," reads one positive review, "and in the end I felt a lovingly crafted homage to the communal joy of experiencing these terrific stories." Multiple reviewers frame the whole release in personal terms — several describe the series as having shaped their decision to work in games at all, and treat Gilbert's direct involvement, after decades of sequels made without him, as a genuinely rare and meaningful event rather than a marketing hook.

The ending, again

Set that goodwill aside, and the negative corpus converges overwhelmingly on one specific element: 64 of the 100 most-helpful English negatives raise the ending directly, and several reviewers make the historical echo explicit themselves. "TLDR: Get it if you don't care about or even like the type of endings that R. Gilbert writes," reads one review. Another, more pointed: "Ron Gilbert and Co. have played the 'the ending does not matter' card in at least other four games now." A third, from a self-described lifelong fan, describes actively regretting having lobbied publicly for Gilbert to get the series back, specifically because of how the story concludes. This isn't a case of a small vocal minority — it's the single largest, most specific pattern in the entire negative sample, and it maps almost exactly onto the exact controversy this same creator caused with the same series three decades earlier.

Puzzle design draws the next-largest share of criticism (48 of 100 negatives), with several reviewers unfavourably comparing the solutions to the harder, more memorable puzzles of the DOS-era LucasArts games. Humour and dialogue quality are raised by 41 of 100, a meaningful but smaller thread than the ending complaint, generally framed as "good but not as sharp as it used to be" rather than a wholesale failure. The new, more stylised art direction is a third recurring point of division — discussed by name in reviews on both sides of the score, with some longtime fans citing it as a genuine barrier even after coming around on the writing and puzzles.

A game most players finish

The achievement curve shows a healthy completion rate for a story-driven adventure: the first chapter milestone sits at 86.8%, with subsequent story-chapter achievements holding in the high-60s through the game's middle stretch — consistent with the high median critic playtime (11.5 hours) and confirming that most of the criticism here comes from players who saw the story through to its contested conclusion, not from people who bounced off early.

7.5 out of 10. Return to Monkey Island is a genuinely well-made, lovingly performed adventure that earns its warm reception on writing, voice acting and music alone. But its own review corpus makes an unusually well-documented case that its ending reopens exactly the debate its creator started with this series in 1991 — and if that history matters to you, it's worth knowing going in rather than discovering at the credits.