I love Monkey Island, and while I'm several steps short of being a full-on roguelike hater, I generally find myself immune to that 'one more run' compulsion. That's why I was a little disappointed that point-and-click legend Ron Gilbert had moved into the roguelike mines. Gilbert, however, hasn't given up adventure games – he would just prefer to do something new with the genre.
"I never stop thinking about adventure games," Gilbert says in an interview with Cressup on YouTube. "Matter of fact, probably a year ago or so, I put together a little design for Thimbleweed Park 2 that I thought, well, it's kind of interesting to make that. So I never stopped thinking about it. But I do feel with adventure games, if I do another adventure game I want to do something that is really different and interesting."
The original Thimbleweed Park, released in 2017, was about as old-school an adventure game as you could get, right down to the classic pixel art visuals and verb-based inventory. Gilbert returned to a familiar franchise with Return to Monkey Island in 2022, but while it featured a bold new visual style and modernized interface, it still hung on to the retro spirit.
"Things like Thimbleweed Park and Return to Monkey Island, they were very nostalgia-based, right?" Gilbert says. "They were there for nostalgic reasons and they really needed to leverage that nostalgia quite a bit. I really want to do something different with adventure games. I want to build so the gameplay isn't that standard point-and-click gameplay, but something different."
Gilbert is "very intrigued by setting a standard adventure game in a real 3D environment, so you're not just walking around a 2D thing, but you have a 3D world to explore." Yet it sounds like that's just an idea – not a game he has a concrete plan for. He cites Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, one of the best games of 2024, as an example of an "utterly fascinating" narrative game, though he admits that's more of a puzzle game than a proper adventure title.
"If I'm going to do another adventure game," Gilbert says, "I want it to be a really interesting and unique and different game, not just another point-and-click adventure game. I haven't figured out what that is, but I never stop thinking about it, right? Even though I'm off working on a roguelike and doing this stuff, I just never stop thinking about that. If I latch on to that idea, then yeah, I would do that."
For now, Gilbert's focus is on Death By Scrolling, a vertically scrolling roguelike RPG that looks pretty neat, even if it isn't entirely within my wheelhouse. I can't begrudge Gilbert wanting to work on something new, though – much as I love classic adventure games, nobody deserves to be chained to their old work forever, and devs like Wadjet Eye and others are keeping that old spirit alive regardless.
The spirit of point-and-click adventures lives on in many of the best video game stories out there.
