Number seven, Elaine Marley and the Ghost Ship
Plot Deconstruction: Elaine Marley has been kidnapped by the fearsome Captain LeChuck! Can she figure out how to wiggle her way out of the Ghost Ship and save herself from an eternal marriage to him?
Positives: The presentation of this game was very stylistic. Every character had a color to their text that fit either what they were or who they were which gave this game an unique personal style. I really enjoyed how the creator wrote the different settings and characters with such fun adjectives, metaphors, and onomatopoeias. The creator also mixed their author notes with the gameplay in a way that felt fairly seamless/cohesively-jointed and helped me gain more understanding as the story went on. Effectively the author notes are part of the game which is rare and so cool! And at the very end, I believe that I connected with the message of the story which is always a mark of a strong narrative.
My Questions/Notes:
Here are some random thoughts that arose during my playthrough
- Ooo I really like the format of going back and forth between the story and the author notes, it really fleshes out the context.
- Elaine is actually very funny
- Ah… interesting ending. I’ll have to write about it.
Overall Impression: Interesting game with a strong theme! I really liked experiencing this.
~ Special Section ~
Something this game had me thinking about:
Although I had no prior knowledge of Monkey Island, I threw myself into the story, tried to get in Elaine’s shoes, and listened closely to the author’s notes to understand the overall context of everything the creator was pondering on when creating this piece.
It seems that the author wanted to give Elaine a more fleshed-out personality than what was provided in the game especially after Monkey Island’s director-swap sent her down the path of becoming even more of a cardboard cutout next to Guybrush’s adventures. And even with the creator’s interpretation, Elaine’s personality was never set in stone.
With the amount of changing links, the reader can decide for themselves who Elaine ‘their’ is. Is she the type to sip a drink like fine wine or chug it down like gatorade? Are her remarks are snide, careful, or humorous? All of these little moments and small personal decisions create the reader’s version of who Elaine is as she finally grows into a real person before their eyes in a way she didn’t get to do in the original series.
But at the end of the story we realize that is was all… for naught. At the end of the day, she is still just a side character in Guybrush’s story.
Whenever we come across a new loop of what happened to her before the events of this game, her self-expression falls deeper and deeper into an abyss until she finally remarks that what she was doing before she got kidnapped… didn’t actually matter. All of the development of her personality that we were experiencing leads to nothing. All of her struggles, creativity, ingenuity? It takes a backseat once the protagonist is there. And though she may want to find her own way off Monkey Island because she’s solved the same trials as Guybrush and has so much that she wants to give to her people, she realizes that at the end of the day she’s only a person to be saved and provide commentary to his adventures afterwards.
She’s effectively tethered to the status quo even in a fangame meant to explore who she is and considering how tightly author notes are bound to this experience, I believe that this struggle is meant to show how even though one can go to the escapism of creativity to give one of their favorite characters some agency, the bittersweet reality still remains and seeps into the game that she never was able to achieve that herself in the main series.
I thought that was a very poignant theme to a story that felt so fun and campy in the beginning. And the climax was abrupt but also hinted at as we watched the slow descent of her mental state.
I found the ending to be very sad but cathartic and meta because at the end of the day, this is a fan-creation of a ‘person’ the author never truly got to experience.
Very fun, I liked gaining a peek and private guide into a game that I had never played.
(Feel free to correct me author if there was another theme that you wanted to highlight)
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From all the feedback I’ve gotten so far, the hornets are kind of the most feared enemy 
Will have to try that again…
