Every Lucasarts Adventure Game: Ranked Worst To Best

Regrettably, by 2000 point 'n' click adventures were no longer à la mode; though its table was embiggening, the industry seemingly had no place reserved for slow-paced puzzle-solvers in the Lucasarts fashion.

Yet they tried to keep up. The least they could do was move into the third dimension, at a time when 2D games were considered an embarrassing anachronism, primitive artifacts of a growing business grasping for respect.

Like every franchise adding depth in the still-nascent 3D era, Monkey Island's first attempt hasn't aged well, the plastic environments and choppy characters lacking the timeless elegance of the perfected-pixel art of its predecessors. A much less forgiving consequence of the dimensional transition are the controls; Guybrush may be a pirate, but that doesn't mean he should have the turning circle and maneuverability of a galleon.

These problems are the natural effects of the genre's necessity to move with the times, but Escape from Monkey Island's most glaring flaw is quite the opposite. With most of the series' key creative personnel having abandoned ship, the fourth swashbuckler instead relies on recycled jokes and tired cameos to infuse it with a Monkey Island feel, and it comes across as stale as Herman Toothrot's pants. Oh, and then there's Monkey Kombat.