Escape from Monkey Island is the first fully-3D Monkey Island game ever, but the series seems to have made the transition from 2D to 3D extremely well. The game will use what was described as a "second-generation version of the Grim Fandango engine." Like Grim Fandango, Escape from Monkey Island will have colorful polygonal characters who can walk or run about rendered backdrops. Like Grim Fandango, Escape from Monkey Island's hero, Guybrush Threepwood, will track objects and characters of interest with head movement. And like Grim Fandango, dialogue with the game's non-player characters will take the form of a series of dialogue choices - none of which will ever be "wrong" (so wrong that you'll have to reload a saved game because of a critical mistake), and all of which will be humorous.

　　However, Escape from Monkey Island will also have a number of enhanced gameplay and graphical features. For starters, the current build of the game looks excellent. Though Grim Fandango used a dark noir theme for its visuals and Escape from Monkey Island will instead use an extremely bright and varied color scheme, Escape from Monkey Island will also look much cleaner than Grim Fandango did. Specifically, during the brief demo session, we noticed hardly any instances of texture seams and none of clipping. But Escape from Monkey Island won't just look better than Grim Fandango - it'll also have several gameplay enhancements, like optional floating sentence tags over items and characters of interest, as well as possible actions, such as using an item on another object or character, or leaving the current section of the map. This sort of extra help will likely come in handy for novice adventurers, though it - and floating text for spoken dialogue text - can be turned off entirely, especially since, like Grim Fandango, all of the game's dialogue will also be spoken.

　　Escape from Monkey Island takes place some years after the previous game; Guybrush has put LeChuck on ice (literally) and has married Elaine. The two have just returned from their honeymoon to Melee Island, but find that Elaine has been declared dead. As such, Guybrush and Elaine must travel to Lucre Island and visit the Marley law firm to set things straight - and discover what could just be the beginnings of a bizarre and sinister plot that's being hatched by a mysterious and truculent Australian land developer, who's reportedly been seen around Melee Island, challenging all the local pirates to bouts of insult-arm-wrestling (that's right... insult-arm-wrestling). You'll have to wait until Fall of this year (when the game is due for release) before you can actually experience insult-arm-wrestling - and the new adventures of Guybrush and Elaine - for yourself. For now, have a look at the screenshots.