Taste is certainly subjective, and I'm also not complaining that styles evolve. But can somebody explain to me what the art style is even trying to do? I mean this purely on an intellectual level, regardless of personal preferences.
Because I have a hard time recognizing the noses as anything but face wounds in some of the shots, and I wonder why the colors were chosen this way. Characters don't stand out from the background very much, which again, is an intentional choice of colors. And the animations seem to happen mostly via rotations and stretches in the 2D plane, which makes everything look flat. (I think that's also what gives the "flash game" vibes that another commenter described.)
Is this supposed to look like it's made out of paper cutouts (in the style of other games with a "hand-crafted" look, like Paper Mario or Kirby's Wooly World)? That's my best guess, but I'm grasping at straws.
Taste is indeed subjective. Many of my daughter’s children book uses this style which stimulates our imagination every night when reading bed time stories. This style makes the story mysterious (none of the shapes are realistic), approachable (you saw the paper cut outs due to the use of textures and the shapes as if they were made with scissors). It is flat as a reminiscence of the original games, but also because it facilitates the point and click gameplay (no 3D to struggle with). On the palette side, it uses heavily saturated vivid colours, which accentuates the exotism of such a travel. I love it on my end.
The target audience is mainly retro fans, not children. I'm not crazy about the choice myself. It makes the animations look awkward and unnatural. I suspect it's a huge time and cost saver though.
Honestly, the environment design reminds me to Day of the Tentacle a bit. It's certainly interesting, I'm curious about how it will look in full scenes.
Still, I'm gonna buy it. It's another Monkey Island. By Ron Gilbert. It could be a text adventure, and I'd still buy it.
My own personal preference would have been retro SCUMM engine, but it's the gameplay and the humour that make Ron's games stand out.
It would make sense to not try and target people like me: The bulk of potential players were probably not born when the previous Monkey Islands games were released.
In stills it feels like it’s waving towards the UPA style, as filtered through modern tools.
Back in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an animation studio called United Productions of America, founded by Disney-trained animators who wanted to rebel against the “illusion of life” so beloved by Walt and experiment with the cool new visual ideas coming from an art movement known as “cubism”, as well as experiment with highly abstracted and stylized forms of movement. Find a copy of Amid Amidi’s book “Cartoon Modern” for a nice survey of this time in animation; look up anything in it that sounds interesting on DailyMotion or Youtube. The sound sync will probably be off by a few frames, which is super noticeable in things this stylized, but you’ll still be able to see how striking this kind of animated cubism can be.
It’s a lot harder to animate than it looks; to really make it work you need to have a firm grasp of animation and 3D movement despite the drawings looking super flat. Over time this look went from super hip and new to the cartoons cranked out for TV by Hanna-Barbera. And design drawings that were inevitably reworked into something less stylized - pick up any Pixar art book and you’ll find a ton of great drawings in this mode.
If you’re willing to split your drawings up into smaller shapes and create more of an illusion of three dimensionality, you can do some gorgeous stuff. But I doubt Gilbert had the budget to do this, given the results in this trailer. Instead we just have cool drawings that are snipped into a few pieces and moved around, which is a thing that hasn’t really been satisfying since Flash made it super easy to do this. And super easy to make animation with no lines.
Two relatively modern examples of this style actually working: Samurai Jack and Psychonauts. One is done by hand, one is trying to adapt these kinds of abstracted shapes into 3D models without super-abstracted rendering.
Monkey Island was always heavily cartoony. Even in the days when cartoony was the only option for resolution reasons they had these woolly clouds and caricature faces and buildings. I think the style fits perfectly with the previous games.
The original games used frame by frame handdrawn pixel art. This is tweening and morphing sprites, which creates a very different look and feel.
The choice makes sense though, as creating handdrawn animations for today's resolution and framerate is an immense amount of work.
I'd still argue it could use a little more contrast between fore- and background, but we will have to wait for the game itself to see if it works better without all the quick cuts.
The OP mentioned the noses, and the limited detail on the faces stands out as a similarity between your two screenshots. The biggest difference that stands out to me is how skewed the scenery is in the new game. This is a style that shows up a little in the original, but it's more characteristic of later LucasArts adventures.
I've played through CMI many, many times, but I have no idea why you would say this is a similar art style. CMI is normal-looking illustrations. This is heavily stylized.
It looks pretty much exactly like those. Was originally hoping for a design which follows Curse of the Monkey Island, but we're getting this. IMO Curse had one of the most beautiful graphic design ever.
I 100% agree with you there. Curse was the best in the series for me too.
Not just in terms of graphics which were beautiful but also in terms of difficulty and story. Monkey Island 2 for example was much too difficult for me to beat on my own. MI3 was doable (as was MI1 though which was epic).
The only thing that was a shame that Elaine was frozen for the whole game (spoiler alert lol).
MI4 was a bit meh in terms of jokes IMO and the vector graphics were too premature to be beautiful.
But I think the style of MI3 is difficult to do in vector format and it's kinda expected these days. I wouldn't have minded another 2D game but I do have to say the action scenes in the video look much better than they would have been in 2D.
> I wouldn't have minded another 2D game but I do have to say the action scenes in the video look much better than they would have been in 2D.
But... it is another 2D game. Those action scenes are being rendered in 2D. There isn't a scene in the video where e.g. the camera angle changes. It all appears to be sprites against backgrounds.
> MI4 was a bit meh in terms of jokes IMO and the vector graphics were too premature to be beautiful.
...and MI4 is a 3D game; it doesn't have vector graphics.
Yeah, it looks to me like it's taking the art direction of Curse of Monkey Island and refreshing it a bit.
All in all I don't hate it, but it's not my taste. I absolutely loved the style of COMI, and I think I get what they're trying to do with the art in this game, but it doesn't feel like they've gotten it quite right.
I really don't think it looks anything like the original game, either. Maybe one of the later sequels which, ironically, Ron Gilbert wasn't involved in.
Having recently gone though all of netflix's "Love Death & Robots", it was quite common for me to initially dislike some of the art styles, specially when going from a hyper-realistic episode to something artsy.
By the end of it, that never impacted my enjoyment. The story is always what did it. And I realized later that some stories would have been hard to tell in the realistic setting.
The point being that art and story are intertwined somewhat, I'll reserve judgement till I experience the full thing.
I think it's supposed to look like illustrations from children's books? I don't care for this particular art style in books either, but I certainly recognize it.
Yeah, it misses the mark because everything looks ... equally ugly? The characters need to look differently ugly depending upon who they are (villain, ally, protagonist, etc.), but they all kind of look the same.
If he's going to do this kind of style, he needs to go watch Samurai Jack over and over until he is channelling Genndy Tartakovsky who knows how to do this kind of minimalist, angular style properly.
A shame they didn't stick to the pixelated art. In my mind it was responsible for the immersive gameplay - since your mind had to work harder to 'imagine' things - filling in those missing details.
They could have used a more modernized pixel art version - like in this game
> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art.
> When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn't feel right. We didn't want to make a retro game. You can't read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a "throwback game". I didn't want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it's interesting, fun, and exciting. It's what the Monkey Island games have always done.
There's also a talk by (I think) Mark Ferrari, where he talks about how they hired artists for these classic pixel art games. Artists were hired on the strength of their art skills, and they had to adapt to the pixel medium in order to make those classic games. Easier to hire an artist and train them to make pixel art, rather than hire a pixel pusher and teach them to make art.
On top of that, Monkey Island 2 was never a real pixel-art game to begin with, all the backgrounds were hand painted[1] and scanned. Only the character sprites and objects were still pixel-art.
I totally get his point and, of course, it's entirely up to him to do whatever he wants with it. However, I think the point about pixel art making a game a "throwback" is a little unfair. I, for one, would love to see a modern pixel art Monkey Island game with a much higher res and a wider palette of colours than was available at the time. I don't think that would make it a "throwback"; pixel art is simply a different style, not just a graphical limitation.
> However, I think the point about pixel art making a game a "throwback" is a little unfair.
I agree, but that’s also not what Gilbert is saying. The problem is not whether it “is” a throwback, but whether it is perceived as a throwback by the general public. That kind of perception drives conversations about Thimbleweed Park and shapes people’s perceptions about it.
Pixel art is, unfortunately, perceived to be low effort. All I really mean by this is that there’s a discrepancy between how hard people think pixel art is to make, and how hard it actually is to make. This makes it more challenging to actually sell games that have pixel art.
I get what Ron Gilbert said by wanting to move Monkey Island forward. As a creator / designer you want to try out new things - because you might be bored with the old ways of doing things.
But as a designer - you're not just creating for yourself. More importantly - with a property like Monkey Island - you're creating for your audience that spans decades,. This loyal audience might have fallen in love with the original style.
It would have been better to move that old style forward - build on it and not completely shift direction.
This new style just looks 'cheap'. Cheap is probably not a fair description - it looks too 'childish'?
Maybe he's targeting the new generation / children and not so much us old timers?
I'm sure the game will be fun though.
If he'd stuck to his principle of using 'state-of-the-art tech and art' - he'd use the art style of 'The Last Night' or similar.
But again - The Last Night is not cheap to produce and you'd need a much bigger team.
Here are more pixelated art games[0] - which to me feel richer than the clean & wonky lines and flat and over-polished feel of this latest MI game.
> I have made one pixel art game in my entire career and that was Thimbleweed Park. Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art. ...
I guess if that's how he wants to describe it, but the fact is that this new game is not using state-of-the-art tech and art. So it isn't similar to Monkey Island 1 & 2.
Some of us lived through that time and despise pixel-art. It didn't even look like pixel art back then because the monitors were blurry. [1]
You're welcome to like pixel art if you want. I don't actually like the new aesthetic either, but I respect the choice--and I do like similar approaches where it's not high-res painting or 3d rendering and instead is abstract art.
> Some of us lived through that time and despise pixel-art. It didn't even look like pixel art back then because the monitors were blurry.
That’s true for console games like the article you linked uses as examples, but PC games did have sharp pixels because they used RGB monitors rather than consumer television sets.
That's not entirely true: my first Monkey Island was the EGA version which was rendered in 320x200 resolution which used 200 scanlines on a real EGA monitor which certainly caused blurring and horizontal lines like on TV. On VGA hardware the 320x200 resolutions were 'scanline doubled' so you got 2x2 'square'-ish pixels and less shadowlines.
Ditto for MI Special Edition from few years back but you could switch between pixelated and vector versions on the fly. Pixelated version, as nostalgic as it was, is clearly inferior. At least as far the gameplay is concerned.
The Last Night looks great in the trailer, but it has also been in development since 2017 and still has no release date. I'm not sure if that style of art scales poorly, or there is some other reason. What do you think of the art of Dead Cells? https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ra1_wvRXZkI
They are still working on it. Release is some time 2023 I think. You should check their Twitter account from time to time: https://twitter.com/oddtalesgames
I think they had to figure out a lot of stuff that hasn't been done before and they have a small team. Check this interview snippet [0].
The art of dead cells looks good!
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[0] Tim Soret in reply to a question: "-Hello Tim, I was wondering how you balance the pixel art and the visual effects in The Last Night. What steps do you guys take to decide which aspects should be pixel art and what needs to be real life looking? And how do you make sure the pixel art of the game is still prominent when viewed? Is a scene considered complete when everyone else in the team agrees to it?"
"Very good question. As the game is getting more & more 3D, for sure it looks less like a parallaxing 2D illustration, and more like a little pixel art movie set with cute props. I wish I could have continued the game like shown in 2017, but relying only on pixel artists to illustrate everything manually became impossible given the surface to cover - and we would have missed all the dynamism offered by our current tech."
"As we're a small team, we prototype using a lot of bought 3D assets (buildings, trees), and even by swapping all the shaders & textures with ours, they don't look exactly like we need them to be."
As someone who's had both a Secret of Monkey Island-themed mobile wallpaper and ringtone at various points in recent years and still plays the first two games every five years or so - where the graphics are concerned I'm in the "Well, they're nothing like the original, but I quite like them"-camp. I think they're probably much more suited to a modern form of game versus a 'find the exact random pixel to solve the puzzle' mechanic. Obvs I'd want more of the same from the first outing, but I'm not Ron Gilbert, so I don't get that say.
But, if I do have a complaint based on the video.. it's Guybrush's voice. I know Threepwood's supposed to be a slightly limp, out of place character, but that voice to me sounds like some average contemporary Joe from downtown Boise, Idaho* with absolutely no historical, Caribbean/Pirate bent or jolly character to it.
That said, unless it's an absolute stinker (like some of the later episodes were), I'll be buying it.
The soundtrack sounds amazing, and I'm going to have the Main Theme stuck in my head as an ohrwurm for the next few days. Again.
.
* As a Brit, I have no actual idea what a Boisean accent is.
I would definitely recommend giving MI3 a go if you haven’t played that.
I played the first two games on my Amiga 500 many moons ago and they’ll always be special to me for igniting my love of the genre, but hearing the characters talking for the first time in 3 blew me away :)
Yeah, I could tell it was him, but I hope they haven't really started dialogue recording and this was a one-off.
His performances are usually more... Lively? Swashbuckle-y? Guybrush is out of water but enthusiastic and trying for the pirates drawl, and I just didn't feel that with this trailer. I hope it's just because he wasn't warmed up for the role again.
MI2 and CMI feature the LeChuck theme, a little bit, but for some reason they've made it quiet and slow. In the original game, it's a high-energy, in-your-face evil theme rather than trying to be a subtle background element. I hope that will be true again in RMI...
I don't mind an artsy-cartoony style, which fit the comical pirate world of the games, but the specific designs do seem to lack the richness and charm of previous games. I don't know, maybe it's the 2D puppet animation that feels lackluster.
Still, the original Monkey Island is one of my favorites. I had given up hope and imagined the "secret" of Monkey Island would only ever become a deathbed confession, so I'm really excited for the game!
It would be like Ron Gilbert's previous game, Thimbleweed Park. I read somewhere that the goal of that game wasn't to deliver a new 1987 pixel game, but to deliver what you _remember_ a 1987 pixel game feeling like, with the modern sensibilities of a built-in hint system and autosave.
Hmm. Seems like there's barely any facial animation. With the pixel graphic you kind of forgave it because your mind fills in the gaps, but with the flash style they are going with here, it feels really dead. At least in this trailer.
The look is different but seems nice enough. Not much dialogue in the trailer, which is the thing that caused so many people to remember the first games so fondly. The dialogue was so fresh funny and energetic in the original games, like if Monty Python at their peak had made a game.
Fingers crossed the magic is still there, and the jokes are irreverent as ever.
> Not much dialogue in the trailer, which is the thing that caused so many people to remember the first games so fondly.
Maybe the HN crowd is too young, but both MI 1 and 2 were originally released on floppy disc, and had no voiced dialogue at all, just text on the screen.
They didn't have voices until they were re-released in 2010.
I'm excited! I loved the first and second installments. the art style is different and I'm open to it. :) I'll reserve my judgements when I actually get to play it.
The art style feels whimsical and absurdist/cubist almost?
I'm not sure if that's answered somewhere but how did Ronnie Gilbert secure the rights for publishing this Monkey Island sequel? My understand is that it belonged to Lucas Arts and now to Disney.
I think the YouTube comments are a perfect example of why great old games don't often get sequels. Fans will complain about everything that's slightly different from the original games.
The Monkey Island series are some of my favorite games. I loved the puzzles and quirky humor. I’m looking forward to playing this and hope they do as good a job with it as Cyan did with Mist VR.
I think it'd be easier to get your bearings when actually playing the game, rather than seeing a montage of clips in a trailer focused on demonstrating the flashier animations.
Agreed. I wish everyone would just standardise on "Mac" and "Windows" rather than the frustratingly ambiguous "PC" (which half the time means both and the other half means just Windows...)
It's just that traditionally some games were never released for the PC
LOOKING AT YOU MICROSOFT; HALO. When it states PC, it's just very clear that it is intended to be played with a keyboard and mouse as input devices.
Personally I would never be interested in a console only title for the controls handicap I'd using a controller. Controls are for platformers only.
People play Cities Skylines and Stellaris on console and I just cannot fathom how you do it, I'm addicted to that mouse and keyboard for those types of games.
It's a point-and-click adventure game. The PC has a mouse. (A Mac version is already announced.) The Switch has a touchscreen. Other consoles don't have any of those.
But jokes aside, this is probably much more than a little teaser and given that it is in good hands I'm sure you are correct that it's well on the way to completion :)
The game's troubled development is probably documented better than the Titanic by now, but FWIW there were a number of points in development where the final product was playable, but didn't get out to store shelves for one reason or another. A few leaks of those various builds actually surfaced recently, and a lot of people found pretty reasonable grounds for the game's development restarting. One of the alpha builds even used straight-up porn as a placeholder texture... I empathize with the project manager(s) of Duke Nukem Forever.
Thimbleweed Park kind of already is that. Well, more a spin-off than a direct sequel, but it's filled with lots and lots of references to Maniac Mansion.
I think they may have gotten this from Get Smart (where it was also a running gag), although it seems like they managed to make good use of it in their own right.
I'm not fond of this particular art style. It's too abstract and the characters are hard to read. If you put them all in suits they'd be the sort of thing you'd see adorning software box covers and PC Magazine op-eds in the very early 90s. But I'm glad they decided to go with a drawn/painted look. Not every 90s franchise continuation has to be pixelshit.
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Because I have a hard time recognizing the noses as anything but face wounds in some of the shots, and I wonder why the colors were chosen this way. Characters don't stand out from the background very much, which again, is an intentional choice of colors. And the animations seem to happen mostly via rotations and stretches in the 2D plane, which makes everything look flat. (I think that's also what gives the "flash game" vibes that another commenter described.)
Is this supposed to look like it's made out of paper cutouts (in the style of other games with a "hand-crafted" look, like Paper Mario or Kirby's Wooly World)? That's my best guess, but I'm grasping at straws.