Two developers that worked on both The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge back in the glorious nineties, recently talked about the regrets they had with those games. The two men are back working on the latest installment in the series, Return to Monkey Island, but even after all these years they still can’t forget about one particular puzzle.
Rob Gilbert and Dave Grossman are the two developers, and during a recent interview, they spoke about how the Monkey Wrench puzzle from LeChuck’s Revenge, a puzzle that involved one Guybrush Threepwood (what a name by the way), and his use of an actual monkey to activate what appeared to be a broken pump. They say it was a mistake and called it “not a good design on several levels.” Fans of the series will still be having nightmares about this seemingly unsolvable puzzle, that’s for sure.
Grossman said, “Even if you are an English speaker from a location where the tool in question is commonly called a ‘monkey wrench, and you realize that that’s what you need, you still have to make an insane prediction about your actions will create that tool.” He went on to add, “Nothing in the game sets any of it up adequately.”
But every wrong decision creates a learning curve, and Grossman has said that he uses the Monkey Wrench puzzle as his blueprint for how not to create a puzzle’s design. By the sounds of it, it really doesn’t sound appropriate, so it’s a good job it has stayed in his mind this whole time. In the interview, Grossman went on to add:
“The player has to be able to somehow visualize what to do, and if they do give up and look at a hint, I want their response to be, ‘Oh, that makes sense, I should have thought of that!’ rather than ‘How on earth was I ever supposed to think of that, you ridiculous unfair clowns?!” Well, that’s one way of putting it Mr. Grossman, maybe they did think like that.
You can have it two ways though, they can either make the puzzles too hard or too easy, but at least with the easy puzzles, players can actually complete the game without pulling their hair out. But let’s hope that Return to Monkey Island has a mix of easy and difficult. Now, there’s no release date as of yet, but expect it to come out later in the year.
