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mlaenie · 4 years ago

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I have picked up playing Sea of Thieves again ever since Season 3: A Pirate’s Life released, and I have done so for a few reasons. Reason number one: I do enjoy playing Sea of Thieves most of the time. Sometimes it is an engaging game fully capable of entertaining me for hours, and sometimes I log in, immediately get attacked by another player or harassed over their mic chat, and get discouraged and tired of playing about 5-10 minutes later. Reason number two: I love Pirates of the Caribbean and a Sea of Thieves crossover between the two sounded like an interesting collaboration. Reason Number three: I heard there were some pretty neat Monkey Island easter eggs hidden in the new Tall Tales and I was not satisfied with simply watching a youtube video about them. I wanted to experience them for myself.

Also, while I have absolutely no intention of purchasing microtransactions for SoT, the rewards for leveling up the plunder pass are pretty neat. I can’t resist collecting every Outlaw Pass in Red Dead Online, either. But RDO is easy because you earn gold for completing missions, daily challenges, bounty hunter missions, and opening treasure chests.

In the first chapter of this new pirate adventure, the player meets with the mysterious Castaway. She tells the player that trouble is coming and that in order to prevent it, they must sail to the Sea of the Damned, a mystifying land of the dead where ghost pirates can sail the seas and while away eternity.

In a fascinating homage to the original Disneyland ride and scenes from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, our player character (whom I feel motivated to develop as my own fan-character offspring of Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley from Monkey Island) is instructed to navigate their way through Dead Man’s Grotto, following ghosts of pirates to find themselves just outside of a desolate town known as Sailor’s Grave.

Our character has one goal— to rescue another pirate who has been imprisoned on the Ferry of the Damned. In order to reach the prisoner, the player must stow away on the Ferry. Before we can do that, however, we must summon the Ferry to Sailor’s Grave with help from a disembodied skull of a cursed pirate (Murray?… Bob? The potential for Monkey Island jokes is endless, in my mind)

Sailor’s Grave is an old town that was once a lively hideaway for pirates to hole up with their loot, but as we visit it, we discover that the town has fallen to ruins and most of the inhabitants have moved on in one way or another, save for one who was left hanging in a cage. The reason he was strung up? His crew mutinied against him after he snuffed out the flames of the lighthouse in order to prevent the Ferry of the Damned parting him with his treasure.

I enjoyed the introduction of the Cursed Captain. I like the idea of my young Captain Marley Threepwood telling the old skull that she’s actually had some prior experience with cursed talking skulls through her father’s old pal Murray. As well as telling him the tales Guybrush would most definitely have told her as a young, starry-eyed kid hungry for her own adventures.

I found it depressing whenever I had to set the Cursed Captain down, even just temporarily. A few times while wandering around the abandoned town, I had to pick up another item needed to fulfill an optional quest objective, only to hear him call out not to leave him behind or remarking that he was being abandoned again as his crew had done to him. As chatty as he was to the point of being annoying after a while, in-character I did not blame him at all after spending so long in isolation.

Plus it’s just nice in a game like Sea of Thieves to meet a skeleton who isn’t hellbent on killing you. And as someone who mainly plays solo and only occasionally teams up at random on open crews who will put up with my silent shenanigans and text chat use, it feels like a relief to see an NPC do most of the talking for once.

The player has the option of either progressing with the main story by taking the Cursed Captain to the top of the lighthouse, where he advises you on how to summon the Ferry by restoring the lighthouse and lighting beacons surrounding the island, or taking him around the remnants of Sailor’s Grave so that he can tell you about the town. There is one hidden beacon in town which, when lit using the lighthouse lens, opens up a gate to an area chock full of Monkey Island easter eggs.

Lightning flashes across the sky as you approach an old shipwreck, and a cinematic screen displays the words “Deep in the Caribbean” as the title theme from Monkey Island begins to play over the area instead of the solemn instrumental rendition of “Yo Ho, A Pirate’s Life For Me” that is heard in the rest of the town. I don’t if the developers were thinking about it at the time, but it seems to call back to Curse of Monkey Island and Edward van Helgen’s pirate story of hearing an inescapably catchy, haunting melody that drove most of his shipmates to madness.

The shipwreck found in this area is none other than the Mad Monkey from Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, the famous shipwreck that Guybrush Threepwood needed to track down in order to retrieve the figurehead so that he could barter it for a piece of the map to Big Whoop, the indescribable treasure he spends the majority of the story searching for. The ship is renamed here to the Headless Monkey by its new captain, Kate Capsize. A series of journals authored by Kate reveal that she was out for revenge on Guybrush for having her falsely imprisoned under his name and stealing her near-grog.

Kate pursued Guybrush across the seas and discovered that he was most likely spending his honeymoon with his bride, Elaine Marley, in the Sea of Thieves. What happened to Kate’s ship isn’t explicitly mentioned, but I theorize that her ship lacked the equipment required to survive sailing through The Shroud (the waters that encompass the Sea of Thieves territory and keep it hidden away from intruders) or that she unknowingly sailed through a portal into the Sea of the Damned and found herself trapped there.

Whatever the true reason for the ship’s destruction and her demise, Captain Kate herself is nowhere to be found. Her final journal entry explains that she has realized revenge is nothing worth living or dying for. She has been reunited with her glass-bottomed boat, which she previously sold, and she only wishes to find a way to come back to life. She sailed off alone and was not heard from again, so it is unknown whether she found a way out or not.

The remains of her ship’s quarters contain a small map of Scabb, Booty, and Phatt Islands, as seen in MI2, and a larger map on the table that features the entire Tri-Island Area as seen in Escape From Monkey Island, including Monkey and Dinky Island as well. There’s no telling what, if anything more, will happen with Monkey Island in Sea of Thieves, but it does give me a glimmer of hope that maybe my all time favorite game series isn’t completely dead yet. It would be fun to see iconic Monkey Island characters physically appear in a future update, if Disney/LucasArts were willing to allow it.

After finally returning to the lighthouse to complete the main objective of lighting the beacons at sea, the Ferry of the Damned begins to approach the island, and the Cursed Captain requests that he be taken to his ship, allowing the player passage from the side door of his quarters through his treasure room and out to a rowboat that our pirate hero must take to sneak themselves aboard the Ferry.

On to the next chapter of the tale, once our pirate successfully makes their way onto the Ferry of the Damned, they sabotage the Ferryman’s Well of Fates by lighting it with the Flame of Souls, setting free the trapped souls and secrets he has kept hidden on the lower decks of his ship. Making their way to the brig, the pirate meets up with the prisoner they are intended to rescue, revealed to be none other than Captain Jack Sparrow. Jack is in possession of a peculiar treasure, a glimmering, glowing box he informs the player character is a key between worlds. He used it to flee to the Sea of Thieves whilst being pursued by Davy Jones, who seemed to have been restored to the Flying Dutchman after the Trident of Poseidon was destroyed.

It’s not really clear how Jones came to be once more, after his death in At World’s End, but I’m willing to borrow another quote from The Curse of Monkey Island, “True evil can never be destroyed completely.” In the context of Monkey Island, this is because the Ghost Pirate LeChuck has ostensibly found his true purpose in rising from the grave to torment Guybrush and attempt to win Elaine’s heart and hand in marriage. Perhaps Davy Jones has found a similar purpose in trying to imprison Jack in the locker?

After a tense battle with the Flying Dutchman, Jack loses the key to one of Jones’ minions who jumps ship with it. Jack demands that the Ferryman pursue the Dutchman, but gets knocked off balance and falls overboard the bow of the Ferry when the Dutchman releases a shockwave that rocks the ship.

With Jack lost to the depths of the Sea of the Damned, the Ferryman fears that both worlds are now in grave danger due to the player character’s selfish actions, but he does reward them for their bravery in fighting by returning them to the land of the living so that they may continue to fight to save the Sea of Thieves from Davy Jones, who intends to turn the high seas into his new locker.

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