by Rick - November 22, 2004

In Return to Mysterious Island, you play as a solo adventurer name Mina. Mina was on an journey around the world in an non-stop race. Her ship, however, is unfortunately caught in a storm and she washes up on the shore of the island that was the setting of Jules Verne's novel "The Mysterious Island."

You have to use Mina's extensive survivalist knowledge to help you survive your stay on the island, as well as finally escape. Along the way you, naturally, uncover a... dare I say it? Mystery.

Egg and Rusty Nail makes... Breakfast?

The game play for Mysterious Island follows the basic concept of adventure games like Myst. The player is presented with a series of areas that contain small and sometimes hard to find trinkets that help you on their adventure. The player explores each of these areas from a stationary location usually in the center of the room using their mouse to highlight objects searching for something useful.

One of the more interesting parts of the game was the item combination system. Where as most adventure games give you a series of items that each have a specific use, the items in Mysterious Island can be combined together to make something more useful than the components. For example you may combine an egg and a nail to create an edible egg (you suck the insides through the hole) or a piece of flint and a piece of metal to create a fire starter (of course then you need combustible material). These combinations get even more complex and useful as you move along. You eventually make things like a fishing pole, bricks and even a battery for your cell phone! My only gripe with the system is that one could just take each new item he finds and try to combine it with everything, thus eliminating the need to be creative.

On the whole, the game play runs very smoothly, and provides an enjoyable experience.

Pretty... oh so Pretty...

Return to Mysterious Island is quite a beautiful game. The scenery is composed of fairly high polygon models and high resolution textures. On top of that, it's done well enough to not cause any sort of noticeable hit on processing.

The opening and closing movies are well done as well, and I wish the game had used more such cut scenes. Whenever you successfully complete some sort of task, the screen shifts to a small series of hand drawn illustrations of you performing the task. Though I enjoyed most of the illustrations, I feel that pre-rendered scenes or even painted versions of the same scenes would have taken the game further.

This game lost most of it's points in graphics due to a few small things. The lighting never changes (besides when you travel to other areas) so the game couldn't boast it's obvious ability at lighting and shading. I also felt that a few animations from some of the native creatures on the island were a little too circular, making obvious that the animations were just replaying over and over. The models used in the game are in fact three dimensional, but due to the lack of 3D movement, the artwork doesn't receive the respect it deserves.

All in all, the game was still one of the better looking games I've played.

Sounds like...

It's as hard to give the sound in Mysterious Island a good score as it is to give it a bad score. There wasn't any particular point where I could say "That was an amazing sound effect." It seemed like the audio was put on the back burner while video and game play was the main focus. While there isn�t anything wrong with valuing certain aspects of a video game over the others, doing so just doesn�t produce a solid level of immersion.

The voice acting for the main character, while done fairly well, was the only voice acting in the game. Her lines were also designed to draw your attention to various aspects of the world and objects you encountered, so she didn�t really have anything interesting to say. The one or two times where something emotional happened, however, the actress did a good job of acting surprised or desperate. I could really feel myself getting excited with her, I only wish there were more of these such occasions.

The ambient sounds used throughout the game were pretty standard. Birds chirping and monkeys chattering. Though whenever you successfully completed a task such as making and item or rebuilding a bridge, the hand drawn illustrations were backed up with some basic sound effects like sounds of a crackling fire or ropes being tossed. This really helped to redeem the use of drawings to narrate action. At the end of it all I feel that the sound, while it could have used some more attention, was decent.

Funky Monkeys for Everyone!

This game was fun. There I said it. I enjoyed playing this game, and I think anyone who enjoys adventure games would also enjoy Mysterious Island.

The puzzles in the game weren't too hard nor too easy. If you stuck with the harder ones long enough, the solution would smack you in the face. The easier ones were larger in number and often had more than one solution.

The story was a bit strange, and it seemed to me like they could have made it a bit more interesting... but then again, even though I've played it twice, there are bound to be countless ways to finish the game, each way revealing more information than the last. Perhaps I failed to uncover some clue that would tie all the little tidbits together.

I think most people would find this game enjoyable, and even replayable. I know I did.

Rated 'M' for Mysterious

One of the interesting things used in Mysterious Island was the use of a point rating system. Each discovery and each completed task had a point value. Every time you reached a multiplier of 100 (not a very often thing) you received a congratulations and some bonus material in the gallery. Though it's not the bonus material that caught my attention. It was the fact that your progress was being kept and you could easily record your score at the end of the game and play again trying to get a higher score. It definitely adds to the game's re-playability factor.

All Aboard Coming Aboard!

All in all, Return to Mysterious Island was an enjoyable game. I suggest that if you see it on a shelf, pick it up and try it out. You might be surpised.