arijigoku
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Someone made the terrible decision of making Clementine the protagonist, so the writers were left in the unfortunate position of making it make sense for the player to make decisions in a group, and they couldn't do it, so the whole game is just grown adults looking to 11 year old for guidance.
2013
The Walking Dead marked the beginning of the end for Telltale, but it was immediately followed up by this masterpiece, which I consider their swansong. It's a ten because Midtown Cowboys plays on the TV in the first episode (which kinda ruins the tone of the scene if you've played Sam & Max, but it still rules). Hoping the sequel (with returning designers & writers) turns out good.
This is not how you follow up the greatest game of all time. An incredibly poor attempt at recreating the first game through the 2nd act, and then going out of its way to explain away all of thematic depth of Monkey 2 with a meaningless narrative. This game looks absolutely beautiful though.
Windows version via DREAMM emulator with "simulated CRT" scaling (copying save data back and forth with a native windows install to get around crashes on DREAMM)
I was excited for this one, looking forward to Stemmle & Clark's follow up to Sam & Max: Hit the Road... I didn't really like it. It's interpretation of the world is weirder than Curse's, but it's wholly built on that. It's biggest crime is that, much like Curse, it devolves into rehashing the first game over and over.
It also ruins the GrimE engine - visually they developed a style for Grim Fandango that perfectly adheres to the low poly models - here? They just tried to directly convert Curse's style in late '90s CG... and it doesn't work. I did set up the latest version of the DREAMM emulator for this, and I gotta say, their new CRT filter is the best I've ever seen and it makes this game look pretty damn good, but it's a huge step down from Grim. The other thing is the controls, Grim was designed to be incredibly cinematic with no hud, apparently people found this confusing so they just chuck a menu on the screen with same keyboard controls assigned to less intuitive buttons. Ech.
Oh and the retcons at the end are even worse than the last game's, completely contradicting Monkey 1 & 2.
I kind of liked the insane Stemmle twists, but eh, it's not really Monkey Island. Which it shouldn't be anyway - but it is, so...
I was excited for this one, looking forward to Stemmle & Clark's follow up to Sam & Max: Hit the Road... I didn't really like it. It's interpretation of the world is weirder than Curse's, but it's wholly built on that. It's biggest crime is that, much like Curse, it devolves into rehashing the first game over and over.
It also ruins the GrimE engine - visually they developed a style for Grim Fandango that perfectly adheres to the low poly models - here? They just tried to directly convert Curse's style in late '90s CG... and it doesn't work. I did set up the latest version of the DREAMM emulator for this, and I gotta say, their new CRT filter is the best I've ever seen and it makes this game look pretty damn good, but it's a huge step down from Grim. The other thing is the controls, Grim was designed to be incredibly cinematic with no hud, apparently people found this confusing so they just chuck a menu on the screen with same keyboard controls assigned to less intuitive buttons. Ech.
Oh and the retcons at the end are even worse than the last game's, completely contradicting Monkey 1 & 2.
I kind of liked the insane Stemmle twists, but eh, it's not really Monkey Island. Which it shouldn't be anyway - but it is, so...
God Stemmle, when supervised by Grossman (and given a little advice from Gilbert) can actually redeem himself for Escape and direct the only good Monkey Island not by Gilbert.