One of the weirdest things about writing a text based game is 'drama'. Not in the words, but in the wrapping. If everything just flows together, nothing has any particular weight. It's amazing how much just doing a fade to black or similar adds a sense of Conclusion to a thing... But of course, you really don't have a lot of tools in your toolbox. So it becomes a real case of figuring out how best to use them - when to show or reveal a character, when to change background, when to do a reveal in the main text or an option... lots of cool microdecisions.

Just for funsies, and because I don't do reviews any more, a few cool adventure design things I noted down while playing #ReturnToMonkeyIsland. No spoilers, promise. Just noting some things that I especially dug. Puzzles are so well signposted, and in multiple ways. You've got the To-Do list as a reminder, but also, character dialogue trees typically leave in a reference to the puzzle they're part of, making it easy to strip the branches and dismiss red herrings or pointless components.

One of the things I'm most enjoying about Return To Monkey Island is the *flow* of it. The character movement is crazy fluid, which is *not* usually the case in these games, and the puzzles blend into each other with incredible style. It's stuff that's hard to define, but There. I'd say it's not a difficult game, but a) I don't think that matters, and b) I've been playing these things for about 30 years, so I probably *should* be vaguely okay at them. But even so, the signposting and flow is super polished.