That’s impossible! Everyone knows it. (Just kidding.)
Yes, Myst and Zork are good candidates, too.
And I tell you, the next time someone quotes ChatGPT my head will explode!
If you like classic graphic adventures, Monkey Island needs to be on your pile! The first two are classics, the numerous more modern sequels that varied the style and format by different companies are fine and only required playing if you’re really into them.
...and they are not abandonware!
The first two are each $10, but the entire collection is $50-something on Steam.
Aww, the most modern one was published by Devolver…
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I’ll second the above (I have a soft spot for Curse of Monkey Island, but I haven’t revisited it recently so can’t say how much of that is just nostalgia). There’s also an episodic series by Telltale not included in that collection - haven’t heard great things about that though. But the original two are still great, and all of them on sale right now on GOG for like 60% off:
https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=monkey%20island&order=desc:score
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This was the original one with full voice acting and hand-drawn animation (versus the original EGA pixel art which has been updated in the remastered versions). Curse I remember liking (if I remember, the opening scene is Guybrush floating in the ocean in a bumper-car) but since it was early full-voice on one CD-ROM, it greatly reduced the sheer amount of dialogue in the game, which to me was the selling point.
I also was so used to the absolute spot-on comedic pacing of the text dialogue that sometimes the (very well done) fully voiced character lines took way longer to perform than it took to read them and I was frequently dribbling my fingers waiting for the vocal performance of long sections to finish before moving on.
This to the point that when Thimbleweed Park came out, I got in the habit of switching (again, very well-done) voice acting on occasionally when I met a new character to hear the voice, then shut it off again because the pure text-pacing was so much tighter. Thimbleweed Park in no way was subject to the limitations for Curse as it had oceans of dialogue. Sometimes it would even revert to text-only for some of the more complicated sections where the volume of choices was part of the joke, and you’d just get a VN-style voiced character bark in the audio even if the line was longer.
The Telltale series Tales of Monkey Island was episodic like all of their releases, I believe it probably comes off better if you play it as one long game. One other downside is the art-style is very plasticky/playdoh-y CGI that isn’t as high quality as one might hope.
Return to Monkey Island is the newest one. I bought it but haven’t played all the way through. It switched to very stylized (2D?) art where everything is slightly weird-shaped and askew (and a bit like South Park cutout art?) but is much more faithful to the look of the original games.
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Hey, I have that, too. And I thought it was only happening to me!
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I hadn’t heard of Secret of Monkey Island either, but definitely going to check it out (can’t beat a price of only $3.49!). Day of the Tentacle is the only LucasArts game I’ve played (first on CD-ROM as a kid, then again recently after the remaster came out), so it’ll be fun to try another one.
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Oh no, I see the GOG version is the special edition–I’d rather have the original with the verb screen!
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I believe you can swap the special edition back to the original graphics, but I haven’t played it myself so would be worth double checking!
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Ohhh, that’s nice! They did have that for Day of the Tentacle.
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On my wishlist are three point and click adventures:
- Return to Monkey Island
- Broken Sword 5 & 6 (6 soon to be published)
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