“I never stop thinking about adventure games,” Monkey Island legend Ron Gilbert says, but as his roguelike nears release he doesn’t want to make another point-and-click simply “for nostalgic reasons”
By Dustin Bailey
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“I never stop thinking about adventure games,” Monkey Island legend Ron Gilbert says, but as his roguelike nears release he doesn’t want to make another point-and-click simply “for nostalgic reasons”
Dustin Bailey
10 September 2025
“If I’m going to do another adventure game, I want it to be a really interesting and unique and different game”
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(Image credit: LucasArts)
I love Monkey Island, and while I’m several steps short of being a full-on roguelike hater, I generally find myself immune to that ‘one more run’ compulsion. That’s why I was a little disappointed that point-and-click legend Ron Gilbert had moved into the roguelike mines. Gilbert, however, hasn’t given up adventure games – he would just prefer to do something new with the genre.
“I never stop thinking about adventure games,” Gilbert says in an interview with Cressup on YouTube. “Matter of fact, probably a year ago or so, I put together a little design for Thimbleweed Park 2 that I thought, well, it’s kind of interesting to make that. So I never stopped thinking about it. But I do feel with adventure games, if I do another adventure game I want to do something that is really different and interesting.”
The original Thimbleweed Park, released in 2017, was about as old-school an adventure game as you could get, right down to the classic pixel art visuals and verb-based inventory. Gilbert returned to a familiar franchise with Return to Monkey Island in 2022, but while it featured a bold new visual style and modernized interface, it still hung on to the retro spirit.
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“Things like Thimbleweed Park and Return to Monkey Island, they were very nostalgia-based, right?” Gilbert says. “They were there for nostalgic reasons and they really needed to leverage that nostalgia quite a bit. I really want to do something different with adventure games. I want to build so the gameplay isn’t that standard point-and-click gameplay, but something different.”
Ron Gilbert on his new rogue-like RPG Death By Scrolling – YouTube
Gilbert is “very intrigued by setting a standard adventure game in a real 3D environment, so you’re not just walking around a 2D thing, but you have a 3D world to explore.” Yet it sounds like that’s just an idea – not a game he has a concrete plan for. He cites Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, one of the best games of 2024, as an example of an “utterly fascinating” narrative game, though he admits that’s more of a puzzle game than a proper adventure title.
“If I’m going to do another adventure game,” Gilbert says, “I want it to be a really interesting and unique and different game, not just another point-and-click adventure game. I haven’t figured out what that is, but I never stop thinking about it, right? Even though I’m off working on a roguelike and doing this stuff, I just never stop thinking about that. If I latch on to that idea, then yeah, I would do that.”
For now, Gilbert’s focus is on Death By Scrolling, a vertically scrolling roguelike RPG that looks pretty neat, even if it isn’t entirely within my wheelhouse. I can’t begrudge Gilbert wanting to work on something new, though – much as I love classic adventure games, nobody deserves to be chained to their old work forever, and devs like Wadjet Eye and others are keeping that old spirit alive regardless.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.
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Monkey Island designer and point-and-click legend Ron Gilbert moving to the roguelike mines feels like my personal hell, but the trailer looks fun enough that I’m trying to keep an open mind
How the Nintendo Switch 2 could take the point-and-click adventure revival to new heights: “The Switch 2 is a better platform than its predecessors for these games”
Doom co-creator John Romero says games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are the future, because they “make AAA studios go, ‘Wait a minute, we need to start doing this”’
31 years later, XCOM creator Julian Gollop says strategy games are still “where my heart lies” and he wants to make them “more accessible and immersive” – his latest attempt is out today with co-op and Pikmin vibes
Where Eric Barone used his indie bucks to buy a proper PC, creator of Stardew Valley-inspired hit Rusty’s Retirement says he’s got the same $1,000 rig after selling half a million copies: “We’ve literally done nothing else differently”
Baldur’s Gate 3 dev says AAA is “perversely fascinated” by indie games, because those devs still understand how to make good ideas that aren’t reliant on data
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