Return to Mysterious Island
Score: 90% ESRB: Teen Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive Developer: Kheops Media: CD/2 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Return to Mysterious Island is a first-person adventure game that has stunning scenery and models. The locations are filled with details that help to pull you into the game and make you feel like you are stranded on the island with Mina (the castaway who you are controlling). The animated portions of each scene (like fire or sea gulls) also do this game justice. These portions don’t look removed or patched into the background like many games of this style. Instead, the animated aspects blend in perfectly with their backgrounds. The music and sounds of Mysterious Island fit the game perfectly. One minute you are walking on the beach with gulls calling in your ear and the lap of the waves in the background, the next you are walking through a dense jungle with a tribal beat.
Gameplay: You are stranded on a deserted island; you have no food, no water, and no way of getting back to civilization. And to make matters worse, this island might not be entirely “deserted.” There is evidence of a wrecked ship, and a person who keeps appearing and disappearing. This is the set up for Return to Mysterious Island. In general, Mysterious Island is just like most other adventure games. You will scour the landscape, pick up anything that you can, and try to use these items with anything that you deem interesting. A nice twist to this game is that you will be able to explore locations and meet people (well, one in particular anyway) from the classic Jules Verne novel Mysterious Island. You’ll visit the Nautilus and explore Granite House. All of these locations seem to resemble what I had pictured in my head the first time I read the book years ago. The Item combination/deconstruction system built into this game really stands out and is another of the features that makes Mysterious Island more than just another point-and-click adventure. But more on that system in the Game Mechanics section. Objects aren’t the only things that you will be dragging along either. You will also find a companion or two along your journey. One of these companions is a monkey. You can use these characters to reach places you can’t normally get to or interact with the world in ways that a human can’t. If you want to cut down a coconut, then all you have to do is give the monkey a knife, and he’ll do it for you. The only possession Mina has with her when she washes ashore is her watch. This watch has many functions (once you recharge it that is). One of these functions is an encyclopedia. This will give you information about the objects you pick up or about particular things in the world around you. This will become an invaluable tool for a lot of players, especially players not familiar with the books surrounding this island or its ghostly inhabitant.
Difficulty: Return to Mysterious Island isn’t the easiest adventure game I’ve come across. There are a lot of items that you will need to collect, use, and combine. Unfortunately, one of the reasons why this game is more difficult than others is that most of the items you need blend in with the background a little too well. At the beginning of the game, when I was trying to feed Mina some much needed food, I found it difficult to find the necessary amount of sustenance, mainly because most of the oysters she needed blended into the background way too much.
Game Mechanics: Return to Mysterious Island has a great item combining mechanic that makes this game stand out. If you combine an item in your inventory that works with another object, the two will go into an area just below the holding bin. Here the items form an equation. Unless all the items are in the equation already, you will find that there is at least one question mark on the right hand side. When you drag the last item into that area, the objects combine to make the new tool. For instance, if you try to combine some lichen and dried palm tree leaves to start a fire, you’ll find them both in the equation area, but with one missing piece. You’ll just need to drag the last object (something to ignite the kindling) into the equation and the inventory items will combine into a fire. Besides the simple handling, what makes this system so good? Well, you don’t need to have all of the items that you are combining in your inventory when you attempt to bring them together. If you just have the lichen and leaves, then the equation will just sit there until you find or figure out what the last object is. If you try and combine more objects, new equations will appear in the box, although you can still scroll back to previous equations. This way, if you are slightly lost or confused about what to do, you can see what items work with each other and that will help figure out what you need to do. This, plus the fact that most of the combined tools can be broken back down to their original parts for reuse in other objects, makes some of the more tedious parts of this game bearable. Return to Mysterious Island is a fun adventure game with a lot of content, but players who aren’t experienced in Jules Verne and his books, “Mysterious Island” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” might not get all of the references in the game. However, they still might find the game enjoyable as an adventure title.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, 800 MHz Pentium III, 64 MB RAM, 16x CD/DVD-ROM, 64 MB DirectX 9 Compliant Video Card, DirectX 9 Compatible Sound, Keyboard and Mouse   Test System: Toshiba Satellite series laptop, Windows XP Home Ed., 2.0 GHz Celeron, 752 MB RAM, 24X DVD/CD ROM, 32 MB 3D accelerator
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