After a somewhat lengthy introduction and tutorial sequence, you get to explore the island and meet a variety of characters ranging from a brash ’ace reporter’ to has-been ex-pirates, but they all share one thing in common: They’re quirky and usually quite funny, with comedy that mixes some sharp one-liners with the sort of random humor you might find in The Critic or a Brooksfilm. You’ll also have to collect various items to solve situations and puzzles with, and they range from the blatantly obvious (in the tutorial) to the rather bizarre, requiring some outside the box thinking and random experimentation to figure out.

That said, this episode has a few flaws. The interface is unusual for this kind of game; rather than being able to point and click at various places to move around, you need to hold your mouse button down and scroll around in order to get Guybrush where he needs to go. You can still click on objects and people of interest to make him move to them, but most of your movement will be done by this ’drag click’ method, and I honestly don’t like it. Also, while most of the puzzles can be figured out with either experimentation or thinking them through, there are a few where it’s difficult to trigger the puzzle even when you know what to do. These are not showstopping concerns by any means, but are nonetheless disappointing.

But those complaints really aren’t enough to drag this episode down, and it should entertain you for about four hours or so. I went in knowing only the bare minimum of Monkey Island series lore to know what concerns long-time fans would have, and now I find myself joining their ranks in cheering Guybrush on. If this is what the Monkey Island series is about, then by all means; bring on more!