Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
REVIEW: Return to Mysterious Island
(Review copyright 2005, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)
Graphics: pretty good
Atmosphere: good
Story: very thin
Writing and dialogue: pretty good, although with some iffy translation
Puzzles: very good
Gameplay: excellent
Difficulty: easy
Forgiveness rating: you cannot get stuck; you can make a fatal mistake, but
the game then undoes the fatal move.
Yes, yes, I enjoy unleashing my corrosive venom on hapless, squirming
game-victims. But it's even nicer when I don't have to.
_RtMI_ was an off-the-moment purchase for me. I'd seen the ad copy, which
talked a lot about "combining items", and also said it was "inspired by the
Jules Verne classic". (Which I took to mean "title by Jules Verne", and
anyhow I've never read _The Mysterious Island_.) And the screenshot on the
back of the box looks like a slot machine on overdrive. So I wasn't sure
what I was getting myself into.
Turns out _RtMI_ is a sweet little primitive-castaway adventure which goes
all-out on two motifs: creating tools, and allowing multiple solutions to
puzzles. Those two ideas are nothing new in adventureland -- as ideas. But
I've never seen a graphical game pursue them with such determination, and
_RtMI_ makes them work very well.
You're a spunky girl navigator (can you think of a better term? I can't)
who's been competing for the Jules Verne trophy -- sailing around the world
solo. Then a storm wrecks you and washes you up on a deserted beach. You've
got nothing but your clothes, your freckles, and a juiceless satellite
phone. (And a priceless ruby necklace, according to the graphics, but that
doesn't play any part in the game. Pity.)
So it's off to survey the area and start collecting Stuff. And oh, this game
has Stuff. Food is the first priority, which means coconuts, turtle eggs,
and crabs; and also a way to crack the coconuts and cook the eggs and crabs.
And also something sharp. Definitely something sharp.
That's a decent handful of puzzles already; and you'll have a dozen items
before you leave the first section of the game. The Stuff builds up rapidly
thereafter. I didn't count, but I must have had fifty items at the peak of
the game. More than that over its course, since some things get used up and
others created. The game gives you a nice tabbed interface with eight
screens worth of slots. Plenty of room to sort and categorize -- plants,
animals products, wood, tools, etc. If some items get more play than others
(hello knife) that's only logical. You'll have plenty of chances to
contemplate the value of the more obscure ones.
There's a nice arc from scavenged raw materials to Stone Age constructions
(flint and steel, slingshot), through the agricultural revolution (steeping
herbs, grinding grain), and into the modern era (as you explore more of the
island and find metal tools and devices. And an abandoned chemical
laboratory. They couldn't skip *that*.) Eventually you're discovering lost
relics of Captain Nemo, that anachronistic old scoundrel, which means
mad-scientific technologies for all.
Plus, there's a monkey. Yes! A monkey!
The nifty thing is that the designers have deliberately (I believe) switched
the focus of the game from the world panorama to the inventory window. Of
course there's still a world to explore, and you'll need to pay attention to
gather all the resources you'll need. But when you ask "what do I spend my
time doing?", the answer is "contemplating my bounty of Stuff, and trying
different combinations". The question of using Stuff on the *scenery* is
still present, but it's definitely secondary. Sometimes it's obvious, given
the tool combinations that you've discovered, what to use them on. Sometimes
it's not obvious, but looking at the scenery is still -- er -- not what you
spend most of your time doing.
The extra-nifty thing is that this is not a weakness. Having decided to use
this game focus, the designers followed through on it. They put in enough
Stuff, and enough interesting combinations, that the inventory window is fun
to play with. It works. You can't just look at it and see the solutions to
all your desires. There are two-step and three-step combinations; there are
obscure uses for things. You don't fall immediately into "use everything on
everything", because there are so many possibilities. You have to inhabit
the world -- consider the Stuff as real-world objects, not as menu tokens.
It's the same mimetic leap that good adventures games have always required.
The only difference is that it's about what you're carrying, not what you're
standing next to.
(In case you're wondering, the monkey (once you get the monkey) acts just
like all your other tools. You can "combine" him with Stuff, and send the
combination -- the tool-held-by-monkey -- to out-of-reach spots, where he
always does just what you want. What a smart monkey!)
This all works because the game allows a *lot* of combinations -- some of
which are disassemblable, allowing you to recover the Stuff for other uses.
And *that* works because of the second focus of this game: multiple
solutions to puzzles. I believe every single problem in the game allows more
than one approach. (Every high-level problem, I mean. There's only one way
to open a coconut; but when food is required, there are many possibilities,
of which coconut meat is just one. The foods I listed earlier are only
*half* of the edible items in the first part of the game -- and more show up
later.)
The upshot is that just because you've made a tool, it doesn't mean it's the
solution to your current problem. Maybe it's a solution to some future
problem. Maybe it's an alternate solution to a problem you've already
solved. Maybe it's a possible solution to *two* problems (and you'll need to
find an alternate for the other one). Maybe you'll have to take it apart,
because it incorporates an item that you need for the actual solution. The
range of choice is wide enough to explore, and indefinite enough that the
sheer mechanics don't give much away. That (as I keep repeating, probably
past the point of tedium) is what makes an adventure game work.
The down side of all this: you can get into an illusory stuck state. This
happened to me once. I was blocked by a problem which (as it turned out) had
three possible solutions. I'd already used up one solution on a previous
similar problem. I didn't think of the second, and the tools I needed to
create it (even accidentally) were in the blocked area. And I didn't think
of the third either, because it involved something which I'd already dealt
with and thus (wrongly) thought of as "finished".
So the designers were certainly providing me with plenty of options. (Even
solution #2 would have worked, if I'd happened to create it earlier. Or if
I'd used it on the earlier similar problem, leaving solution #1 still
available for this one.) However, I was locked into thinking about solution
#1, because that one had already worked. Only I'd used it up. So it *felt*
like a classic "you lose, start over" game design. Presumably I should have
had more trust, but that's the way the cookie crumbled. I wound up looking
at hints to discover solution #3.
A couple of other design quibbles: the endgame involves a lot of Captain
Nemo's technological gadgets, which somehow translates to a lot of puzzle
locks. You know, the kind that aliens and mad wizards are always using to
protect their secret lairs. Now, I *like* puzzle locks. And _RtMI_ has good
ones: mostly original puzzles, and pleasantly confusing while still being
suspectible to careful experimentation and analysis. (And the designers even
manage to allow multiple solutions in this part of the game. For example,
two locked doors that ultimately lead to the same destination.)
However, after an entire game of physically realistic puzzles, the Nemo
stuff is rather a sudden swerve. People with a grudge for arbitrary puzzle
insertion might be turned off by the endgame. Be warned.
The other quibble is a bunch of timed sequences in the latter part of the
game. All of these have multiple solutions (some with easier timing, some
with harder timing). *Many* of them (but I believe not all) have alternate
solutions which don't require any timing at all. As is usual with
adventure-marketed games, all these timed actions will be easy for the
average player -- you get unlimited tries, of course. (The game can show
your death, but then it puts you back to try again.) If you really can't
face them, you can look for the untimed solutions.
I've already said that I liked the inventory interface. (The only thing it
lacks is a way to transfer several items from one tab to another. This would
have been helpful, e.g., when I unloaded four pieces of cloth into the wrong
tab window.) The rest of the game's interface is unassuming, but tidy. The
game is pleasantly flexible about interactions; once you solve a puzzle in
one spot, it's generally taken care of for the whole game, avoiding the need
for mechanical repetition. For example, once you make a clay bowl, the game
gives you a whole collection of clay vessels; it simply says it's as many as
you need. This doesn't happen everywhere -- you'll find yourself gathering
some items repeatedly -- but mostly it's very smooth.
Interesting note: the designers weren't shy about using simple ink sketches
for cut scenes, instead of fully-rendered 3D animations. This allowed them
to put in quite a number of brief cut scenes -- illustrating minor
interactions as well as major plot events. Definitely a worthwhile tradeoff.
For example... early in the game, you encounter fresh water. This is likely
before you make those clay bowls. So there's no way to *take* the water.
A bad design solution would be to have no hotspot for the water -- have the
hotspot appear as soon as you create vessels. A decent solution would be to
have a hotspot with the red "you need a tool here" cursor. A good solution
would be to have a "you have no way to carry water" voiceover when you click
the hotspot.
The design solution in _RtMI_, which I like a lot, is to have a hotspot
which leads to a cut scene of you drinking some water. If you try it a
second time, there's a scene of you bathing. (Nothing racy, you pervs.) The
third time I tried it, I had acquired the clay bowls, so the game awarded me
a bowl of water for my Stuff collection. These were ink-sketch cut scenes,
so they were easy to throw into the game; and they did a good job of keeping
the water "alive" in my memory until it was time for me to pick some up.
My biggest regret about _RtMI_ is that it's very short. Even with all the
Stuff, and all the variations of things to do, I finished it in about six
hours. I think this is a consequence of the design, really. Most games give
you a constant stream of new scenery to explore, and interactions are spread
(relatively) thinly across the scenery. This game has a pretty small map;
you go back and forth a lot, finding Stuff and applying it in new ways.
Travelling back and forth through familiar territory is simply not
time-consuming.
And, as I said, the biggest area of gameplay is your inventory, which is
easy to play around with. If you're not sure what to do, you try some more
combinations. I said that the sheer number of possibilities *discourages*
"use everything on everything" brute force. It doesn't *eliminate* it. If
you think an item is relevant to your current situation, you can reasonably
test it against every reasonable possibility. (And this involves no
travelling; the possibilities are what you have in your hands.) Also, once
you reach a certain point in the plot, you have access to an encyclopedia,
which acts as an unsubtle hint source for tool combinations. The upshot of
all this is, you'll rarely be stuck.
I was almost never stuck. (The one exception, where I needed a hint, I've
already described.) That meant that, for most of my six-hour session, I was
rolling through the game at full speed. I nearly always had puzzles piling
up faster than I could solve them! It was *fun*, and it was always engaging
enough to keep me in the game world -- even when I was trying lots of
combinations, I had to think about what I was doing. But it also explains
why I finished so quickly. A game only has so much content, and when you're
burning through the content as fast as it's fed to you, the game only lasts
so long.
I think that covers it. I could talk about the plot, but the plot is
basically wallpaper. It's there to justify a whole lot of tool use on a
deserted island. Yes, the Captain Nemo stuff comes up at the end; but it's
scenery, and in-joke references to the Verne book. It doesn't form a
background story of its own, and it's barely relevant to *your* story.
(Now that I look at _The Mysterious Island_, I see that it really is a huge
tool and chemistry geekfest. A lot of the puzzles in this game are taken
straight from the book. All the backstory, too. Not sure whether this makes
me more or less pleased with the game designers. Kind of like the
_Necronomicon_ situation: the background material was nice, until I realized
it was all stolen. And just like in _Necronomicon_, the new ending they made
up didn't fit very well. At least this time the stolen plot wasn't central
to the game.)
*Summary*: Short, but exceptionally well-designed and a lot of fun to play.
I notice that Kheops Studio, the developers of _Return to Mysterious
Island_, are credited as the programmers (but *not* the writers or
designers) of _Crystal Key 2_. That game, you'll recall, I found notable for
its terrible writing and design. I say Kheops should do more of its own
material.
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
REVIEW: Return to Mysterious Island
(Review copyright 2005, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)
Graphics: pretty good
Atmosphere: good
Story: very thin
Writing and dialogue: pretty good, although with some iffy translation
Puzzles: very good
Gameplay: excellent
Difficulty: easy
Forgiveness rating: you cannot get stuck; you can make a fatal mistake, but
the game then undoes the fatal move.
Yes, yes, I enjoy unleashing my corrosive venom on hapless, squirming
game-victims. But it's even nicer when I don't have to.
_RtMI_ was an off-the-moment purchase for me. I'd seen the ad copy, which
talked a lot about "combining items", and also said it was "inspired by the
Jules Verne classic". (Which I took to mean "title by Jules Verne", and
anyhow I've never read _The Mysterious Island_.) And the screenshot on the
back of the box looks like a slot machine on overdrive. So I wasn't sure
what I was getting myself into.
Turns out _RtMI_ is a sweet little primitive-castaway adventure which goes
all-out on two motifs: creating tools, and allowing multiple solutions to
puzzles. Those two ideas are nothing new in adventureland -- as ideas. But
I've never seen a graphical game pursue them with such determination, and
_RtMI_ makes them work very well.
You're a spunky girl navigator (can you think of a better term? I can't)
who's been competing for the Jules Verne trophy -- sailing around the world
solo. Then a storm wrecks you and washes you up on a deserted beach. You've
got nothing but your clothes, your freckles, and a juiceless satellite
phone. (And a priceless ruby necklace, according to the graphics, but that
doesn't play any part in the game. Pity.)
So it's off to survey the area and start collecting Stuff. And oh, this game
has Stuff. Food is the first priority, which means coconuts, turtle eggs,
and crabs; and also a way to crack the coconuts and cook the eggs and crabs.
And also something sharp. Definitely something sharp.
That's a decent handful of puzzles already; and you'll have a dozen items
before you leave the first section of the game. The Stuff builds up rapidly
thereafter. I didn't count, but I must have had fifty items at the peak of
the game. More than that over its course, since some things get used up and
others created. The game gives you a nice tabbed interface with eight
screens worth of slots. Plenty of room to sort and categorize -- plants,
animals products, wood, tools, etc. If some items get more play than others
(hello knife) that's only logical. You'll have plenty of chances to
contemplate the value of the more obscure ones.
There's a nice arc from scavenged raw materials to Stone Age constructions
(flint and steel, slingshot), through the agricultural revolution (steeping
herbs, grinding grain), and into the modern era (as you explore more of the
island and find metal tools and devices. And an abandoned chemical
laboratory. They couldn't skip *that*.) Eventually you're discovering lost
relics of Captain Nemo, that anachronistic old scoundrel, which means
mad-scientific technologies for all.
Plus, there's a monkey. Yes! A monkey!
The nifty thing is that the designers have deliberately (I believe) switched
the focus of the game from the world panorama to the inventory window. Of
course there's still a world to explore, and you'll need to pay attention to
gather all the resources you'll need. But when you ask "what do I spend my
time doing?", the answer is "contemplating my bounty of Stuff, and trying
different combinations". The question of using Stuff on the *scenery* is
still present, but it's definitely secondary. Sometimes it's obvious, given
the tool combinations that you've discovered, what to use them on. Sometimes
it's not obvious, but looking at the scenery is still -- er -- not what you
spend most of your time doing.
The extra-nifty thing is that this is not a weakness. Having decided to use
this game focus, the designers followed through on it. They put in enough
Stuff, and enough interesting combinations, that the inventory window is fun
to play with. It works. You can't just look at it and see the solutions to
all your desires. There are two-step and three-step combinations; there are
obscure uses for things. You don't fall immediately into "use everything on
everything", because there are so many possibilities. You have to inhabit
the world -- consider the Stuff as real-world objects, not as menu tokens.
It's the same mimetic leap that good adventures games have always required.
The only difference is that it's about what you're carrying, not what you're
standing next to.
(In case you're wondering, the monkey (once you get the monkey) acts just
like all your other tools. You can "combine" him with Stuff, and send the
combination -- the tool-held-by-monkey -- to out-of-reach spots, where he
always does just what you want. What a smart monkey!)
This all works because the game allows a *lot* of combinations -- some of
which are disassemblable, allowing you to recover the Stuff for other uses.
And *that* works because of the second focus of this game: multiple
solutions to puzzles. I believe every single problem in the game allows more
than one approach. (Every high-level problem, I mean. There's only one way
to open a coconut; but when food is required, there are many possibilities,
of which coconut meat is just one. The foods I listed earlier are only
*half* of the edible items in the first part of the game -- and more show up
later.)
The upshot is that just because you've made a tool, it doesn't mean it's the
solution to your current problem. Maybe it's a solution to some future
problem. Maybe it's an alternate solution to a problem you've already
solved. Maybe it's a possible solution to *two* problems (and you'll need to
find an alternate for the other one). Maybe you'll have to take it apart,
because it incorporates an item that you need for the actual solution. The
range of choice is wide enough to explore, and indefinite enough that the
sheer mechanics don't give much away. That (as I keep repeating, probably
past the point of tedium) is what makes an adventure game work.
The down side of all this: you can get into an illusory stuck state. This
happened to me once. I was blocked by a problem which (as it turned out) had
three possible solutions. I'd already used up one solution on a previous
similar problem. I didn't think of the second, and the tools I needed to
create it (even accidentally) were in the blocked area. And I didn't think
of the third either, because it involved something which I'd already dealt
with and thus (wrongly) thought of as "finished".
So the designers were certainly providing me with plenty of options. (Even
solution #2 would have worked, if I'd happened to create it earlier. Or if
I'd used it on the earlier similar problem, leaving solution #1 still
available for this one.) However, I was locked into thinking about solution
#1, because that one had already worked. Only I'd used it up. So it *felt*
like a classic "you lose, start over" game design. Presumably I should have
had more trust, but that's the way the cookie crumbled. I wound up looking
at hints to discover solution #3.
A couple of other design quibbles: the endgame involves a lot of Captain
Nemo's technological gadgets, which somehow translates to a lot of puzzle
locks. You know, the kind that aliens and mad wizards are always using to
protect their secret lairs. Now, I *like* puzzle locks. And _RtMI_ has good
ones: mostly original puzzles, and pleasantly confusing while still being
suspectible to careful experimentation and analysis. (And the designers even
manage to allow multiple solutions in this part of the game. For example,
two locked doors that ultimately lead to the same destination.)
However, after an entire game of physically realistic puzzles, the Nemo
stuff is rather a sudden swerve. People with a grudge for arbitrary puzzle
insertion might be turned off by the endgame. Be warned.
The other quibble is a bunch of timed sequences in the latter part of the
game. All of these have multiple solutions (some with easier timing, some
with harder timing). *Many* of them (but I believe not all) have alternate
solutions which don't require any timing at all. As is usual with
adventure-marketed games, all these timed actions will be easy for the
average player -- you get unlimited tries, of course. (The game can show
your death, but then it puts you back to try again.) If you really can't
face them, you can look for the untimed solutions.
I've already said that I liked the inventory interface. (The only thing it
lacks is a way to transfer several items from one tab to another. This would
have been helpful, e.g., when I unloaded four pieces of cloth into the wrong
tab window.) The rest of the game's interface is unassuming, but tidy. The
game is pleasantly flexible about interactions; once you solve a puzzle in
one spot, it's generally taken care of for the whole game, avoiding the need
for mechanical repetition. For example, once you make a clay bowl, the game
gives you a whole collection of clay vessels; it simply says it's as many as
you need. This doesn't happen everywhere -- you'll find yourself gathering
some items repeatedly -- but mostly it's very smooth.
Interesting note: the designers weren't shy about using simple ink sketches
for cut scenes, instead of fully-rendered 3D animations. This allowed them
to put in quite a number of brief cut scenes -- illustrating minor
interactions as well as major plot events. Definitely a worthwhile tradeoff.
For example... early in the game, you encounter fresh water. This is likely
before you make those clay bowls. So there's no way to *take* the water.
A bad design solution would be to have no hotspot for the water -- have the
hotspot appear as soon as you create vessels. A decent solution would be to
have a hotspot with the red "you need a tool here" cursor. A good solution
would be to have a "you have no way to carry water" voiceover when you click
the hotspot.
The design solution in _RtMI_, which I like a lot, is to have a hotspot
which leads to a cut scene of you drinking some water. If you try it a
second time, there's a scene of you bathing. (Nothing racy, you pervs.) The
third time I tried it, I had acquired the clay bowls, so the game awarded me
a bowl of water for my Stuff collection. These were ink-sketch cut scenes,
so they were easy to throw into the game; and they did a good job of keeping
the water "alive" in my memory until it was time for me to pick some up.
My biggest regret about _RtMI_ is that it's very short. Even with all the
Stuff, and all the variations of things to do, I finished it in about six
hours. I think this is a consequence of the design, really. Most games give
you a constant stream of new scenery to explore, and interactions are spread
(relatively) thinly across the scenery. This game has a pretty small map;
you go back and forth a lot, finding Stuff and applying it in new ways.
Travelling back and forth through familiar territory is simply not
time-consuming.
And, as I said, the biggest area of gameplay is your inventory, which is
easy to play around with. If you're not sure what to do, you try some more
combinations. I said that the sheer number of possibilities *discourages*
"use everything on everything" brute force. It doesn't *eliminate* it. If
you think an item is relevant to your current situation, you can reasonably
test it against every reasonable possibility. (And this involves no
travelling; the possibilities are what you have in your hands.) Also, once
you reach a certain point in the plot, you have access to an encyclopedia,
which acts as an unsubtle hint source for tool combinations. The upshot of
all this is, you'll rarely be stuck.
I was almost never stuck. (The one exception, where I needed a hint, I've
already described.) That meant that, for most of my six-hour session, I was
rolling through the game at full speed. I nearly always had puzzles piling
up faster than I could solve them! It was *fun*, and it was always engaging
enough to keep me in the game world -- even when I was trying lots of
combinations, I had to think about what I was doing. But it also explains
why I finished so quickly. A game only has so much content, and when you're
burning through the content as fast as it's fed to you, the game only lasts
so long.
I think that covers it. I could talk about the plot, but the plot is
basically wallpaper. It's there to justify a whole lot of tool use on a
deserted island. Yes, the Captain Nemo stuff comes up at the end; but it's
scenery, and in-joke references to the Verne book. It doesn't form a
background story of its own, and it's barely relevant to *your* story.
(Now that I look at _The Mysterious Island_, I see that it really is a huge
tool and chemistry geekfest. A lot of the puzzles in this game are taken
straight from the book. All the backstory, too. Not sure whether this makes
me more or less pleased with the game designers. Kind of like the
_Necronomicon_ situation: the background material was nice, until I realized
it was all stolen. And just like in _Necronomicon_, the new ending they made
up didn't fit very well. At least this time the stolen plot wasn't central
to the game.)
*Summary*: Short, but exceptionally well-designed and a lot of fun to play.
I notice that Kheops Studio, the developers of _Return to Mysterious
Island_, are credited as the programmers (but *not* the writers or
designers) of _Crystal Key 2_. That game, you'll recall, I found notable for
its terrible writing and design. I say Kheops should do more of its own
material.
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
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