The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a high-definition remake of the original Secret of Monkey Island game that was first released in 1990 for PC, Atari ST, Amiga and eventually several other platforms. The basic premise is that you play a wannabe pirate called Guybrush Threepwood, who sets out on a journey to become a fully fledged pirate in the Caribbean. The Secret of Monkey Island has a very quirky sense of humour and it is this humour that most people fondly remember the series for. There are so few genuinely funny computer games that, even now, the Monkey Island series stands out as among the funniest games of all time.

The gameplay is essentially a ‘point ‘n’ click’ adventure that requires players to explore various locations across the caribbean, collecting objects, talking to NPCs and generally solving puzzles to meet the objectives of the game. Like many adventure games from the early 90s, it is virtually impossible to die or fail in the game, leaving you free to try out as many wacky and inventive ways of solving puzzles as you like, without the fear of seeing a game over screen.

The original game had the gameplay area at the top of the screen and showed the control buttons and your inventory underneath – in the Special Edition, the buttons and inventory are stored off-screen, accessed by pressing L1 or R1. This does introduce a slight difficulty in moving, modifying and accessing your stuff, leading to some of the more fast-paced puzzles becoming quite tricky, especially using a controller compared to a computer mouse.

Fortunately, the game includes the original graphical interface as an option that you can switch to at any time by pressing select. This helps restore fast access to your inventory as well as providing a healthy dose of nostalgia for veterans of the series, and newcomers will probably have a good laugh at how vulgar the original graphics look now – even though at the time they were pretty good.

The new graphics, while retaining the animation frames from the original, are all redrawn in high resolution with some fantastic looking artwork. By and large the new artwork is a faithful reproduction of the original, with a few minor exceptions, the most obvious of which is the addition of a new pier next to the SCUMM bar.

As someone who played and loved the original games at the time, it is an absolute joy to revisit the locations of this game with such wonderful graphics. However, what sets this game apart from just a quick graphical update is the audio. The original MIDI tracks have been re-recorded in full polyphonic glory and sound fantastic, but the real star of the show is the voice acting. The original game’s text only approach has been thrown out of the window and replaced by full on voice acting, something that was only introduced into the series by the third game, The Curse of Monkey Island. What’s more, most of the original voice cast from The Curse of Monkey Island are brought back for this one, giving a fantastic continuity to the series.

Strangely, one of the few downsides to the game is that by default the subtitles are left on and if you choose to disable them, the game forgets your settings next time you load up your game. That really is only a very minor inconvenience however, and surely a patch of some sort would fix the issue without too much fuss.

Like all PS3 games nowadays, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition features Trophy support and while the game would still be fantastic without them, the Trophies do add a nice little bonus to the game to encourage you to try out as much as you can, like learning all the ‘pirate insults’ and seeing if you can get Guybrush to drown.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a well-polished and worthwhile update to one of the funniest and cleverest games of all time. Fans of the first few games will be delighted by the new look and sound of the game, and will find this an absolutely charming trip down memory lane. For fans of the later games, this will explain all the back story and will be an excellent way to explore the origins of the series. For total newcomers who have never played any of the Monkey Island games (shame on you!), there is no better way to introduce yourself to the series than starting here. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is one of the finest PSN titles to date. Find out if Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge lives up to this precedent in our review next week!