The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
Worth it · Narrative · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $9.99, a BANGER if it drops to $8.18.
- Length
- 6.7h
- Value
- $1.49/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, 128 MB with Shader Model 2.0 capability, 2.5 GB of storage. Windows only.
Back by popular demand, The Secret of Monkey Island™: Special Edition faithfully re-imagines the internationally-acclaimed classic game (originally released in 1990) for original and new audiences alike.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.99, set in August 2022. It has been discounted 56 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 65 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 12 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $8.18 BANGER line 56 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 69 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. The nearest things to it, Monkey Island™ 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge™ ($9.99, scores 63) and King's Quest (free, scores 79), are both worse buys on this math.
The press gave it 86; the people who bought it give it 95 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
None of the 427 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 86 percent of the 565 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
Players
16 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I took this at a slow pace and played with someone else. This is a classic for a reason; it's full of terrifically silly fun, and uses a bevy of mechanics to keep your brain stretching for creative solutions. The game is fair, ad as far as I can tell, can't be made unwinnable. There's not really any moon logic here. Any time we were hitting a wall, we could generally chalk the issue up to parts of the map left...
I may be missing something but this game is style over substance. I can only play the game for short spells because it soon becomes tedious with all the walking, repititious swordfights, etc. One really annoying bug is that the music does not stay turned off and requires muting every time the game is loaded. I may finish the game but I will not be adding any of the other titles to my wishlist.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition scores 81/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/32360/the-secret-of-monkey-island-special-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.