While I'm not even remotely approaching the skill ceiling of this game, I do have to say that as I've gotten better and more deliberate about my playing style, I've garnered a deeper and deeper respect for the game's aesthetic and design work.

There are so many layers of strategy that emerge as you grasp the basic scoring mechanics, and can start thinking about things like joker lineups and deck manipulation. The experience of winning runs is immensely satisfying and addicting, but the game is unique in that it actually seems to be giving back to you in equal measure. You are improving your mental calculation skills, risk management abilities, intuition for numbers et.c.. I've had it feed directly into real-life assessments on a number of occasions. It's like the game is making me more cautious, smarter about my decisions – in essence, more like its creator.

Real classic and GOTY material. I can't stop thinking about it. I'm increasingly convinced this has the chance to become a new kind of Solitaire, something which is ported to everything and enjoyed by players for years to come.

Competent and enjoyable in stretches, but overall unambitious and held back by its archaic point-and-click design sensibility. Lost count of how many times I basically knew the solution to a puzzle, and then had to fiddle around for what felt like ages just to hit the specific order of events that the designers intended.

The writing and music hold the same standard as the first three titles, but there are too many familiar faces and disappointingly little contemporary energy to be found. Monkey Island was very of its time and cultural moment. It's a quintessentially Gen X/90s franchise. What was once so refreshing about that – the self-awareness, the postmodern signifier juggling, the slacker energy channeled in the underhanded puzzle solutions – somehow I can't help but feel we're past that. It's all been absorbed and sent through the slipstream of pop culture. You can't just throw it at the audience again expecting the same result.

I loved these games growing up and would never really mind getting more of the same if I'm being honest with myself. It's comfort food, pure and simple. Slots right into the grooves. The music is a bop. But it's a relic of the past that never tries to push its frame of reference. Another artifact of stuck culture. Two and a half stars.

Like Myst or The Witness if they didn’t have any gameplay whatsoever. The vague, lumbering prose and cryptic imagery littered throughout may be super profound for all I know, my problem is that I'm just too comfortable not expending any energy to understand it beyond the surface level. To put it simply, it's a problem of trust. How am I supposed to know if all this obscure verbosity carries some deeper, rewarding intent? Apparently I'm not alone in not being all that engaged by this: according to Steam, only a third of players completed this one-hour game, and only around half made it past the first chapter.

Arguably, this may have been the first real walking sim, predating both Gone Home and Stanley Parable by a year or so. To be fair, it deserves some credit for this, and does stand out visually with some exceptional texturing and shader work. I was impressed by how looking back and to the side would often reveal some breathtaking, painterly compositions that must have required quite a bit of intent to integrate. However, this is still a game, and as a game it feels just a few steps removed from the sensibilities of a 90s multimedia product: just so archaic, so fundamentally deficient and crippled in its design, I can't really bring myself to embrace it for what it is. Two stars.