Hothead's Ron Gilbert

Stick to the script

"I came in to consult on the adventure aspects," he confirms. "It's kind of a light adventure game; there aren't going to be these really intricate, mind-boggling puzzles you would find in Monkey Island."

Instead the focus is on dialogue, every word of which has been written by Penny Arcade comic strip author Jerry Holkins. "Jerry is a fabulous writer and we wanted to showcase that, so we focused on the way the story is told through Monkey Island-style dialogues," Gilbert explains.

With his name attached, Penny Arcade Adventures is likely to attract fans of Gilbert's previous games. But without the mind-boggling puzzles, are they going to be disappointed? "I think what they'll get out of this is the humour," says Gilbert. "A lot of people love Monkey Island because it is a laugh-out-loud game. I think this game absolutely has that. Jerry is probably one of the top five writers I've ever worked with. So I think Monkey Island fans are going to like the humour in this game, definitely."

Is Penny Arcade Adventures funnier than Monkey Island? Laughing, Gilbert replies, "I'm not going to answer that question."

There is good news for those who like their Ron Gilbert games a little more meaty. He's also working on a title called Deathspank. Like Penny Arcade Adventures it blends adventure and RPG gameplay, but according to Gilbert there are some key differences.

"The adventure game aspects in Deathspank are a lot more traditional and hardcore," he begins. "You are going to get a lot of really intricate puzzles. The RPG is more like Diablo or Zelda as opposed to the turn-based Final Fantasy gameplay in the Penny Arcade game.

"It's more action-based; you're doing a lot more running around fighting things, monsters drop stuff, you get those in your inventory and use them to equip your character... But it is melded with what I would term classic Monkey Island-style puzzles."

Anti-heroes

Deathspank is the name of the game's main character. He's a parody, Gilbert explains, "of the game heroes everybody takes far too seriously... He tries to help people out but he's misguided and naive, and he ends up doing more damage than good".

"Everybody from Duke Nukem to all of these characters, they're over-the-top and ridiculous and I wanted to make fun of that," he continues. "That's why he has the name Deathspank. It's just such a stupid name, right?"

Right. However, the game is more than just a satire of videogame heroes. According to Gilbert, it discusses themes of moral ambiguity and continually presents players with grey areas to explore. "Deathspank comes into situations and causes trouble and kills a lot of people you thought were good. But maybe they weren't. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? You never really know. There's a lot of ambiguity in games and what people do in them, and I wanted to play with that."

That doesn't mean you're asked to make moral choices along the lines of, as Gilbert puts it, "Do I help the beggar on the corner?", unlike in other games. "You know, in Fable there were these very hard, binary choices, and they branched down into trees. Deathspank is a lot more fluid. As you play the game you're going to do things, and they maybe seem a little bit weird and wrong as you're doing them.

"But in the end... I want to leave the player, when they end a Deathspank episode, a little bit confused about whether this was right or wrong and what's really going on."