Return to Monkey Island: How to Die
Guybrush Threepwood has finally returned to our shores, bringing with him another incredibly fun point-and-click adventure that harks back to the golden era of PC gaming in the ’90s. Return to Monkey Island is an irrefutable smash — a quirky, charming, and consistently challenging romp that hasn’t lost any of the series’ appeal after its long and frustrating hiatus.
Much of the game’s appeal is based on nostalgia, transporting players back to a time when whimsical imagination and a cheeky sense of humor were more important than the number of repetitive side quests a player could complete or whether they could pull off a suitably impressive kill -to- fatality rate. The point of monkey island should always be fun, challenging, and charming—traits that go against the idea of the main protagonist dying. However, Guybrush has been able to meet his death a few times throughout the series, usually from contact with water. This year’s installment is no exception.
How to kill Guybrush in Monkey Island series
Return to Monkey Island isn’t the first game that plays with the idea of ejecting its protagonist from his mortal shell. In the series’ debut title, Sheriff Shinetop’s new Swashbuckler is thrown into the water as part of his plan to take over Melee Island. After Guybrush goes into hiding, the player has a generous ten minutes to find an escape route, thanks to his claim to fame for being able to hold his breath that long. However, if players fail to rescue Guybrush in the allotted amount of time, he will turn an ominous shade of green and begin to levitate, signifying his watery death.
The magnificent but brutally challenging 1991 sequel, LeChuck’s revenge, also introduced a few ways for players to eliminate their inept protagonist. Most notorious is an achievement found in the game’s special edition called “Five Minutes Later,” which is achieved by failing to find a way to escape from LeChuck’s entangled acid trap. In this case, Guybrush is dunked in a vat of boiling acid along with the cowardly cartographer Wally and seemingly dissolved.
How to kill Guybrush in Return to Monkey Island
Quite fitting for a game full of Easter eggs, callbacks and jokes for longtime fans, the source of Guybrush’s death Return to Monkey Island once again falls into the hands of his old nemesis, the sea. In the second act of the game, once our hero has boarded LeChuck’s spooky ghost ship, he can climb across the outside deck, where he will be asked to “check the rudder”. Once Guybrush has done so, he will descend into the ocean, whereupon a digital timer will appear, counting down from eight minutes (instead of the ten that Guybrush so often boasts about).
The expiration of the timer interrupts the proceedings and cuts back to the game’s narrative framework, in which Guybrush is recounting his adventures to his young son on a park bench, informing him that “time is running out”. When time and air run out for another five minutes and forty-five seconds, players are thrown back to the present, at which point Guybrush Jnr. will tell his father to stop! and tell the story correctly. However, when time runs out for another three minutes and forty-five seconds, the game shows nothing but an empty bench, accompanied by the explanation that “Guybrush died from an accident that authorities would later describe as an accidental drowning”, causing his happy future is snuffed out with his wife and child in favor of a darkly comic explanation of how the secret of Monkey Island “was never found”.