Return to Monkey Island gets Skyrim's worst DLC as a pre-order bonus

Return to Monkey Island
(Image credit: Toybox Games)

Return to Monkey Island got a fresh trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live, revealing the new adventure game's release date and an appropriately absurd piece of pre-order DLC inspired by one of the Elder Scrolls series' most infamous mistakes.

The trailer confirmed that Return to Monkey Island will launch for PC and Switch on September 19, which certain kinds of nerds among you will remember is Talk Like a Pirate Day. (You do not have to talk like a pirate to play the game, though it won't hurt.)

All kinds of familiar locations are revisited in the brief trailer, narrated by the series' lovably sleazy used boat salesman, Stan. But maybe the most intriguing bit is the promise that you'll get horse armor as a pre-order bonus. Yes, in tribute to the very bad bit of DLC for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which helped kick off microtransactions in triple-A games, you will get horse armor for buying Return to Monkey Island early.

Yes, it seems like the devs are entirely serious about giving you some useless horse armor to sit in your inventory. Even the press release promises that pre-orderers will "begin their adventure with a highly exclusive and entirely useless horse armor in their inventory," and you can't just make a joke in a press release. (I think.) It's the next-best thing to a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, but it will solve 100% fewer puzzles.

For more new games for 2022, you can follow that link for a big list of all the most notable titles coming in the near future.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

With contributions from