Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert isn’t interested in making another 2D adventure game, despite having brought the series back in precisely that form only a few years ago.
Speaking to Ars Technica, Gilbert compared “use verb or noun”- style adventure games to black and white silent movies, expressing that making games like that now would feel similarly dated.
It’s a little surprising to hear from Gilbert, considering the recent output of his studio Terrible Toybox. Two of the studio’s last three games—namely Thimbleweed Park and Return to Monkey Island—were classically-styled adventures. But Gilbert believes there are more innovative and interesting ways to make adventure games today, pointing to games like Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes as an example: “I think games like that are kind of the future for adventure games,” he said.
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This isn’t just because Gilbert believes such a game would be more palatable to modern audiences, however. “I don’t really know how you would do puzzle solving in [that] way, and so that’s very interesting to me, to be able to kind of attack that problem of doing it in a 3D world.”
This isn’t a wholly new stance for Gilbert, who has drifted between classic adventures and more modern experiences before. But it is worth noting that 2025 has been one of the strongest years for classically-styled adventure games in ages. Examples include Wadjet Eye’s brilliant mystery Old Skies, the comedy whodunit Loco Motive, and pulp thriller The Drifter. Granted, none of these games were massive commercial successes (although The Drifter seems to have performed reasonably well). But there’s definitely still an audience for these kinds of games—it’s just a case of reaching them with something that hits.
Gilbert’s latest project, meanwhile, is the 2D action game Death by Scrolling, where players evade the clutches of the Reaper by continually moving up the screen. This game emerged off the back of plans for a larger, Zelda-inspired RPG, which Gilbert ultimately cancelled because he didn’t “have the money or the time to build a big open world-game like that” and the financing deals he was offered by publishers “just made absolutely no sense”.
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