Return is very much a return to the Ron Gilbert style of P&C adventure games for better or for worse. Here’s all the negatives I can think of:
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Heavily reliant upon MI1, really the game is like an appendix for MI1 more than anything else. MI2 and Curse are very much their own games, whereas this one isn’t. Curse expanded the MI world whereas it feels that Return has contracted it.
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Like Curse it tries to relive too many aspects of the original. To give an example from Curse, the insult sword-fighting from MI1 is replaced with the rhyming sword-fighting and in my view is one of the worst parts of the game. It would have been better if Curse had simply decided to do sword fighting in its own completely new way instead of trying to reinvent the Monkey1 insult sword fighting.
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Curse is probably a better sequel with more consistent humour.
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Thimbleweed Park is better in several ways.
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The verbless interface is a downgrade.
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No proper MacGuffin to drive the story forward.
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The secret was already figured out some 15+ years ago. It feels like Return is too self-aware.
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The ending is abrupt.
Return avoids the mistakes made by Escape and Tales, but makes some of its own.
On the other hand it brings its own benefits as well. It picks up after Monkey 2 with an improvement over Curse’s handling of MI2’s conclusion. Arguably this is one of the things it does best. The art style is fresh and amazingly appropriate for the game, and the voice acting is of course great unlike the not-so-special Special Editions of MI1 & 2. The in-built hint system is amazing and allows the player to complete the game without getting stuck for hours or relying on external guides, and it’s now clear this feature is missing in every other MI and LucasArts game. It works far better than the traditional hint books and is a model system that every new point-and-click adventure game should follow.
Return won’t please everyone, but it is a good game as long as you don’t expect it to be something it isn’t. It has effectively revised the series that was all but dead and buried and it has repaired the damage done by the previous instalments (in particular Escape). It is very much a Ron Gilbert game so who knows, maybe someone else will carry the story forward in the future with a new instalment the way Curse did.