[codeflo]

Taste is certainly subjective, and I'm also not complaining that styles evolve. But can somebody explain to me what the art style is even trying to do? I mean this purely on an intellectual level, regardless of personal preferences.

Because I have a hard time recognizing the noses as anything but face wounds in some of the shots, and I wonder why the colors were chosen this way. Characters don't stand out from the background very much, which again, is an intentional choice of colors. And the animations seem to happen mostly via rotations and stretches in the 2D plane, which makes everything look flat. (I think that's also what gives the "flash game" vibes that another commenter described.)

Is this supposed to look like it's made out of paper cutouts (in the style of other games with a "hand-crafted" look, like Paper Mario or Kirby's Wooly World)? That's my best guess, but I'm grasping at straws.

[batmansmk]

Taste is indeed subjective. Many of my daughter’s children book uses this style which stimulates our imagination every night when reading bed time stories. This style makes the story mysterious (none of the shapes are realistic), approachable (you saw the paper cut outs due to the use of textures and the shapes as if they were made with scissors). It is flat as a reminiscence of the original games, but also because it facilitates the point and click gameplay (no 3D to struggle with). On the palette side, it uses heavily saturated vivid colours, which accentuates the exotism of such a travel. I love it on my end.

[DrSiemer]

The target audience is mainly retro fans, not children. I'm not crazy about the choice myself. It makes the animations look awkward and unnatural. I suspect it's a huge time and cost saver though.

[kuang_eleven]

Honestly, the environment design reminds me to Day of the Tentacle a bit. It's certainly interesting, I'm curious about how it will look in full scenes.

Still, I'm gonna buy it. It's another Monkey Island. By Ron Gilbert. It could be a text adventure, and I'd still buy it.

[dwd]

My own personal preference would have been retro SCUMM engine, but it's the gameplay and the humour that make Ron's games stand out.

It would make sense to not try and target people like me: The bulk of potential players were probably not born when the previous Monkey Islands games were released.

[egypturnash]

In stills it feels like it’s waving towards the UPA style, as filtered through modern tools.

Back in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an animation studio called United Productions of America, founded by Disney-trained animators who wanted to rebel against the “illusion of life” so beloved by Walt and experiment with the cool new visual ideas coming from an art movement known as “cubism”, as well as experiment with highly abstracted and stylized forms of movement. Find a copy of Amid Amidi’s book “Cartoon Modern” for a nice survey of this time in animation; look up anything in it that sounds interesting on DailyMotion or Youtube. The sound sync will probably be off by a few frames, which is super noticeable in things this stylized, but you’ll still be able to see how striking this kind of animated cubism can be.

It’s a lot harder to animate than it looks; to really make it work you need to have a firm grasp of animation and 3D movement despite the drawings looking super flat. Over time this look went from super hip and new to the cartoons cranked out for TV by Hanna-Barbera. And design drawings that were inevitably reworked into something less stylized - pick up any Pixar art book and you’ll find a ton of great drawings in this mode.

If you’re willing to split your drawings up into smaller shapes and create more of an illusion of three dimensionality, you can do some gorgeous stuff. But I doubt Gilbert had the budget to do this, given the results in this trailer. Instead we just have cool drawings that are snipped into a few pieces and moved around, which is a thing that hasn’t really been satisfying since Flash made it super easy to do this. And super easy to make animation with no lines.

Two relatively modern examples of this style actually working: Samurai Jack and Psychonauts. One is done by hand, one is trying to adapt these kinds of abstracted shapes into 3D models without super-abstracted rendering.

[kyorochan]

Cartoon Modern was recently made available digitally, for free [1]. Well worth the download.

[1] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/our-treat-to-you

[jl6]

I will of course reserve judgement about whether it's a good game or not, but I agree - the animation makes me think 2000s amateur Flash.

Just look at how much better Prince of Persia from 1989 is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(1989_video_g...

[GekkePrutser]

Monkey Island was always heavily cartoony. Even in the days when cartoony was the only option for resolution reasons they had these woolly clouds and caricature faces and buildings. I think the style fits perfectly with the previous games.

[DrSiemer]

The original games used frame by frame handdrawn pixel art. This is tweening and morphing sprites, which creates a very different look and feel.

The choice makes sense though, as creating handdrawn animations for today's resolution and framerate is an immense amount of work.

I'd still argue it could use a little more contrast between fore- and background, but we will have to wait for the game itself to see if it works better without all the quick cuts.

[pier25]

I like the style, except for the faces. They look super weird.

I agree with your other points about characters not standing out etc but they don't bother me as much as the faces.

[jedberg]

It's made to look like the original game.

[codeflo]

I hope this Imgur link works, here are two shots of what I assume is the same room. You can't possibly be serious: https://imgur.com/a/IGPhFtd

[djur]

The OP mentioned the noses, and the limited detail on the faces stands out as a similarity between your two screenshots. The biggest difference that stands out to me is how skewed the scenery is in the new game. This is a style that shows up a little in the original, but it's more characteristic of later LucasArts adventures.

[eknkc]

It looks a lot like the Curse Of The Monkey Island though.

[thaumasiotes]

I've played through CMI many, many times, but I have no idea why you would say this is a similar art style. CMI is normal-looking illustrations. This is heavily stylized.

[GekkePrutser]

It also looks a lot like the style of the telltale episodes

[jq-r]

It looks pretty much exactly like those. Was originally hoping for a design which follows Curse of the Monkey Island, but we're getting this. IMO Curse had one of the most beautiful graphic design ever.

[GekkePrutser]

I 100% agree with you there. Curse was the best in the series for me too.

Not just in terms of graphics which were beautiful but also in terms of difficulty and story. Monkey Island 2 for example was much too difficult for me to beat on my own. MI3 was doable (as was MI1 though which was epic).

The only thing that was a shame that Elaine was frozen for the whole game (spoiler alert lol).

MI4 was a bit meh in terms of jokes IMO and the vector graphics were too premature to be beautiful.

But I think the style of MI3 is difficult to do in vector format and it's kinda expected these days. I wouldn't have minded another 2D game but I do have to say the action scenes in the video look much better than they would have been in 2D.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It is nowhere near the original game. Source: I played it and the remake.

If anything, this art style resembles Deathspank [1], another game by Gilbert. Btw it had hilarious trailers like this one [2].

[1]: https://youtu.be/tcLTBwr5JBY

[2]: https://youtu.be/FGWT6YPu4v4

[stouset]

Yeah, it looks to me like it's taking the art direction of Curse of Monkey Island and refreshing it a bit.

All in all I don't hate it, but it's not my taste. I absolutely loved the style of COMI, and I think I get what they're trying to do with the art in this game, but it doesn't feel like they've gotten it quite right.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I really don't think it looks anything like the original game, either. Maybe one of the later sequels which, ironically, Ron Gilbert wasn't involved in.

[hahamrfunnyguy]

I like the art style, as well as the music, color palette and voice over acting. It seems to capture the feel the original games were going for.

Then again, I never played them until the mid 00's. I have no expectations.

[ramblerman]

Having recently gone though all of netflix's "Love Death & Robots", it was quite common for me to initially dislike some of the art styles, specially when going from a hyper-realistic episode to something artsy.

By the end of it, that never impacted my enjoyment. The story is always what did it. And I realized later that some stories would have been hard to tell in the realistic setting.

The point being that art and story are intertwined somewhat, I'll reserve judgement till I experience the full thing.

[kitsune_]

Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yAxIdkF2Qo

[aidenn0]

I think it's supposed to look like illustrations from children's books? I don't care for this particular art style in books either, but I certainly recognize it.

[bsder]

Yeah, it misses the mark because everything looks ... equally ugly? The characters need to look differently ugly depending upon who they are (villain, ally, protagonist, etc.), but they all kind of look the same.

If he's going to do this kind of style, he needs to go watch Samurai Jack over and over until he is channelling Genndy Tartakovsky who knows how to do this kind of minimalist, angular style properly.