Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Review: The Sequel That Raised the Bar

Look, here’s the thing about Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. It’s when LucasArts stopped having a laugh and started making killer stuff. I’ve played this game since the early 90s when I finally got a proper PC, and even now, with teenagers who roll their eyes at games if they don’t have a battle royale mode, I can fire this up and get sucked in for hours. Sam here, and while team RPS always argues over whether Secret of Monkey Island or LeChuck’s Revenge is the best, I’m in the latter camp. Not because of nostalgia. Because it knew what was great about adventure gaming, and pushed it.

Releasing in December 1991 (Wikipedia), LeChuck’s Revenge came at the perfect moment in gaming history. LucasArts had established its adventure credentials, SCUMM (to control characters) was mature enough to go for ambitious ideas, and Ron Gilbert (IMDB) had one last pirate adventure to call his own. What we got was 18 months of development time (Legend of MI) slotted into a game, and the template for what came later.

Everything came together perfectly – the technology and the talent, and the independence to break things in pursuit of jokes, safe from corporate overlord demands for focus groups and market research.

The Magic Ingredient

What made LeChuck’s Revenge so revolutionary wasn’t just that it was bigger than the original – and it was, with over 100 locations (Wikipedia) spread across three main islands (Wikipedia), and at the time it felt gigantic. The real genius was in how it kept the charm of the original but tightened the flow and added complexity that rewarded you for going off the main path. The improvements to SCUMM and the introduction of iMUSE (Wikipedia) meant that LucasArts could finally pursue their vision of true dynamic adventure gaming.

The changes to the interface may feel slight to us now, but they were revolutionary at the time. You know that part of the early adventures where you spend half your time trying out verb combinations nobody would ever use? LeChuck’s Revenge neatly encapsulated everything while retaining the required layer of complexity for puzzles to feel rewarding. Right click context menus felt magical when there was no way you’d ever type “This verb in that direction” again. But where LeChuck’s Revenge really shows its brainpower is in the way that the puzzle design is really smart about how refined you want your experience to be. If you want to meander towards the main quest the game isn’t going to stop you, and will feel perfectly satisfying, but if you want to explore every branch of the conversations and see every piece of background detail you’ll discover layers of jokes and references and optional flavour that tie the whole world together. The writing demanded that players be smart and observation also had its rewards. Good modern games walk a tightrope of not being exclusionary, but with no hint of “here’s the thing you obviously must do now” or even “here’s our laundry list of items you can pick up,” we weren’t being treated as stupid either.

The genius of its inventory management is worth highlighting in that it fixed and prevented adventure game pitfalls with smart scavengers having sensible uses and nary a red herring to be found. Picking up that near dead skull or fish in a bowl led to figuring out what to do with them in time without resorting (mostly) to trying everything on everything.

Animation: A Small Thing Makes The Difference

Fun fact, the sequel is deceptively large and tiring to replay. These are also big games that are longer than they appear. Trade-off is that there isn’t a dirty little secret of lucid gameplay hidden inside all that cake, and smooth moves are made repeatedly during back-tracking to get everywhere quickly. One of the things I notice is that it refines the sense of making it all seem larger, of building a believable world.

The original Monkey Island paved a great tributary, but LeChuck’s Revenge felt like it had space and everything in it needed a reason to be there. Scabb Island, Phatt Island, Booty Island all take on very particular personalities from the problems underlying the geography and the problems it harbours. Places feel like they existed long before we get there and will go on existing well after we leave.

Same with the people. Kate Capsize on Booty Island, the Phatt Island governor, Stan’s previously owned vessels. It’s enormous character work. Voice work was prototyped in a mini-game (Monkey Island SCUMM Bar) during development of LeChuck’s Revenge and showed that LucasArts put effort into building refreshing character to all but the simplest of callous cardboard cutouts.

The economies make believable islands. Scabb Island’s descent into lawlessness, Phatt Island’s bureaucratic corruption, Booty Island’s merchant capitalism. These weren’t just comic spook-show backdrops, but serious social structures from which NPC behaviours were drawn and the kinds of problems Guybrush could encounter were determined. We could see why people behaved the way they did given the place and situation they were in which lent the laugh to hit a bit harder as well. This was environmental storytelling reaching very clever heights. Look how the layout of room and placement of props tells stories in Scabb Island, how the prison system on Phatt Island tells character through wonderful bureaucratic nonsense, how shops and services on Booty Island paint a culture of commercial maritime. Geographical location is really just archaeology that you are unearthing through a language of observation.

Technical Stuff That Still Impresses

The iMUSE system must be one of the cleanest, smartest ways to produce interactive music, and the compositions themselves by Michael Land (Monkey Island Timeline) are never musically inelegant or relentless to the ear. The pieces can flow easily between variations, moods and instrumentation, based upon what the player does, or changes of location. The way walking from shops on Booty Island to the beach creates subtle thematic changes is an understated way of enhancing the concept of place rather than drawing attention to itself. The graphics are really how VGA should be, and Steve Purcell’s art direction was very strong (albeit somewhat cartoonishly sweet) in appearance, and colour charts and depths were worked out powerfully within limitations. Character animations had personality in every frame. Guybrush’s idle animations alone revealed more character than cutscenes from later games.

The improvements made to SCUMM (Wikipedia) made possible ridiculously complex scripting and interaction systems. As many ways as a conversation could branch, the consequences would be felt later on. The state of an object could change depending on logic tests. Importantly, dozens of variables could be tracked, and changes they would trigger created an illusion of real responsiveness that was breathtaking compared to other 1991 games. Loading couldn’t be avoided unless you played from a hard drive (still somewhat rare in home computing at the time!). Compression and streaming algorithms meant getting from one location to another retained a sense of immersion that loading screens would break. It was magic, to me, accustomed as I was to changing floppy disks every few minutes.

The Puzzles That Define Adventure Gaming

That voodoo doll puzzle (Wikipedia) I promised to talk about? It’s iconic for a reason. It’s the very best of LeChuck’s Revenge, balancing logical deduction against creativity. The solution requires knowledge of character relations, environmental details, and creative linkages between parts of the game world. It is complex enough you feel good when you do solve it, but not so hard a determined player is left frustrated. Anyone who spends enough time figuring things out can do it with logical observation and trial and error.

And oh, that spitting contest! Won’t you tell me not to bother with it, it sounds that banal. The puzzle mechanics aren’t deep of course. Learn the rhythm, hit your spots. But the dialogue reacting to itself each passing round of the whole contest! Sheer genius. It’s mechanically clever and narratively hilarious, something modern games are still struggling to achieve.

Fans are split on the finale sequence itself, but it demonstrates Gilbert’s willingness to go there. The ending commits rather than hedges on its chosen interpretation. Without spoiling anything, let it be said that this ending doesn’t lack for conviction whether you love it or strongly dislike it, and if nothing else, that has to be lauded.

Puzzle difficulty ebbs and flows nicely as you progress. Early puzzles on Scabb Island are designed to introduce the logic of the game and its internal rules. Mid game puzzles on Phatt and Booty Islands require you to practise what you’ve learnt in slightly changed contexts, and the end game requires proven competency with all the systems you’ve been developing your skillset with throughout the entire experience. It has the pacing of proper education. Every success is a preparation for the next step.

Why It Still Matters Now

Playing through LeChuck’s Revenge again now I’m struck by how confident the game feels. There’s no fat, no gorging in order to fluff up the length of the game, no “hey this mechanic is in vogue, let’s add it.” It’s a game that knew what it wanted to be and had the creative and technical arsenal to achieve it.

The remastered Special Edition versions have brought this title to new audiences, but I think the original graphics still look magnificent on a proper CRT monitor. The pixel art has that timeless quality that early 3D graphics completely lack. When my teenagers finally gave it a shot (after enough nudging and nagging, even promising pizza!), they were astonished at how engaging it is despite the outdated user interface conventions.

Modern adventure games feel either too streamlined or artificially convoluted. LeChuck’s Revenge somehow found that perfect sweet spot where difficulties arose from clever systems rather than arbitrary decisions. Every place served multiple purposes for a multitude of characters, every character had a reason for being, every puzzle felt like a reward instead of a disappointment. It’s a tutorial on economy of design that new developers should be taking copious notes from.

How well the writing holds up! The humour functions on a range of levels without relying on references that do not stand the test of time. The relationships feel grounded even when set amidst absurdist nonsense. The conversations have a rhythm that voice acting hasn’t been able to touch. It actually seems normal and pleasant to read through this dialogue and that is an impressive feat for text-heavy games of that era.

The Definitive Pirate Adventure

Look, I’m serious, this was Ron Gilbert’s last Monkey Island game (Wikipedia). And you can feel it. What followed had quality moments, but never seemed to have this perfect blend of ambition and restraint. This is the game where everything peaked at once. Writing and graphics and music and design and technical implementation. The series went on and some of those later games had their merits. However, LeChuck’s Revenge represents something unique in history when adventure games had pushed as far as possible before corporate commoditisation and the dreaded march to casual simplification and niche obscurity.

Accessible without being dumbed down, complex without being opaque, funny without sacrificing drama. Whenever someone asks me what classic adventure games I recommend, I start with this one because it demonstrates how compelling this kind of interactive storytelling can be when designers have the experience, tools, time, and enough freedom to realise their creative vision without distraction. We would never see a game like this again because the industry decided it no longer wanted to aim for focused, laser-like creativity in favour of multiplayer mass appeal. That makes preserving and celebrating this achievement all the more important. This is what it all looked like at its peak.

Samuel

Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.