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Review
The Story
Ghost Ship is a Monkey Island fan game. It’s also a critical essay about the series and one of its central characters, Elaine Marley.
The plot is fairly bare-bones: Ghost Ship has the player solving a few simple puzzles to turn Elaine into a ghost. Once that happens, Elaine can accomplish her role in the original plot of the Monkey Island games.
Major spoiler: Ghost Ship literally ends with Elaine (Spoiler - click to show)fading away.
It’s a pointed conclusion, and I’m pretty sure the author means for it to relate back to Ghost Ship’s overarching themes. The in-game author’s notes describe how Elaine has been overlooked or had her original characteristics erased throughout the Monkey Island series. That fits into the overall ‘ghost’ theme.
When I put it like that, Ghost Ship sounds like a shaggy dog story. Maybe it is — maybe it has to be since it’s a slice of an existing story — but it’s also a character piece. So let’s look at how that does the heavy lifting.
Characterization
In Ghost Ship, Elaine is portrayed through her interactions with a few other characters, but mostly through the narrative tone.
I was going to say that Ghost Ship leans on internet-era snark, with a little more venom than classic Monkey Island humor. I remember Elaine being indignant in context in the official games, not so much snarky for the sake of snark.
But after reading @SpaceTurtles’ review, I see that the exact dialogue choices are left up to the player. I guess the fact that I was put off by some of the snarkier options says more about me than the game.
There are also some concrete attempts to add depth to Elaine’s character. For example, in one key repeated scene, the author tries to portray Elaine as traumatized by LeChuck and as overcoming that trauma. That sort of weightiness would be out of place in the original Monkey Island, but this isn’t the original game, and I think it will be well received by the right audiences.
Ultimately, Elaine is a competent character with some edge, as she is in the games, so the slightly different tone works in the end.
Portraits of Elaine
The game also concerns itself with Elaine’s visual appearance. The author prefers Elaine’s original design and is very critical of the cartoonier designs. The cartoonier designs arguably correspond to poor characterization, with Elaine being reduced to a love interest in some of the later games.
Here’s everything side by side in a single image.
Notably, Elaine is portrayed as a black woman on the cover of Ghost Ship. I like the new portrait for its own sake. Elaine looks good in her own right, and it works as a race-blind interpretation of the character. And above all, it made me want to play the game.
Usually there would be no need to say more than that. However, Ghost Ship is explicitly about Elaine’s appearance. Early on in the game, the author argues that a change to Elaine’s skin tone — a gradual shift from dark to light — is something that’s been taken from her over the course of the series.
But actually, it’s in some of the later games that Elaine has an olive skin tone relative to certain characters. In the first two games, most Monkey Island characters had exactly the same reddish skin tone as Elaine. In fact, most video game characters had that tone as well.
That’s because there were few viable options in the 16-bit EGA color palette. You can see a bunch of Monkey Island characters here, including one who was meant to have a darker skin tone.
It’s debatable whether Monkey Island handles race and culture well or not — how much of it is pirate clichés versus Caribbean etc. stereotypes? But I think it’s clear that some other characters in the series would provide a lot more substance in this area. Trying to apply it to Elaine seems like looking for a problem.
Game Design and Styles
Lastly, how does Ghost Ship play? It has a pretty ambitious design visually and functionally. It’s not perfect, but it’s original and it works.
In terms of function, you’ll interact with the game through an inventory, things that are sort of like contextual boxes, text that replaces itself on hover, images, and regular links. The game is split into chapters and author notes, all united through a main menu, with some repeated scenes sprinkled in.
This would make for a disjointed interface in a more complex game, but Ghost Ship has pretty simple puzzles and progression. I never got stuck or lost.
On the visual side, there’s a lot of font styling and a variety of page layouts. It’s usually appropriate and it sometimes looks good, especially the ectoplasmic green font used for ghost dialogue. Occasionally, some of the colors aren’t really visible against a black background. (The author has also apparently fixed some problems with automatic text, so that’s good.)
In the end, Ghost Ship is rough around the edges at times, but I’m glad that it was made since there are very few semi-documentary IF games like it.
Related Media
Anyone who’s interested in the meta-ness of Monkey Island that Ghost Ship builds on might be interested in this YouTube video.
In fact, you might want to watch it beforehand — I’m no expert on the series and it covers some stuff that is directly relevant to Ghost Ship. Knowing the things that video explained helped me get more out of the author’s notes.
I also wanted to mention a movie called The Cry of Granuaile. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I guess there is something about legendary, semi-forgotten pirates that invites this sort of metafictional roleplaying. The film goes into Spartacus-esque “we are all Granuaile” territory. Anyone who liked Ghost Ship would probably enjoy it.
