This is a graphical adventure game, not a text adventure game, but I don’t want to post this in off-topic.
I’ve been playing return Return to the Mysterious Island. I started it a few years ago but never got past the first section, but I partially based the system on Bigfoot Bluff around the points-based model the early game uses.
Basically, in Return to the Mysterious Island, each section the story is gated by a certain number of things you have to do. In the first two sections, it involves restoring health or strength to a character. Later, you have to shoot down a certain number of steampunk drones.
This means cooking food, making medicine, making weapons and ammunition, etc. What’s important is the fact that you can do almost everything in multiple ways. You don’t need to do every single thing, and if you get stuck, you can usually just work on something else. I didn’t start resorting to a walkthrough until about half way through. Usually, when I needed a walkthrough, it turned out I was trying to make something too complicated.
It’s not a perfect system though. Some of the score threshold requirements are a bit higher than they need to be, and some of the items are unfortunately breakable. And since a lot of the items are natural (sticks, fruit, rocks, metal, etc.) they are often very similar in type but aren’t interchangeable.
There are also a few mandatory puzzles. Those that are mandatory are usually well-designed. I was particularly impressed by the pottery wheel puzzle; all you have is a spinning table, but so few things move like that in real life that it was completely obvious to me that it was for making pottery.
There is also a monkey sidekick that you can hand your items off to. This basically extends the item system: you can make monkeys with knives. You can make monkeys that fly on UFOs. You can make monkeys that bribe other monkeys with alcohol.
The game also seems to do something really annoying that also made me laugh. As far as I can tell, the developers did not program the engine in such a way that the pre-rendered graphics can be moved (you can only pan around the graphics).
So at least twice, it simulated an earthquake not by shaking the images, but by messing with the mouse. In fact, if you open the game’s menu it during the earthquake, the mouse still jitters! I haven’t fully tested it to make sure that it’s not just a weird error…but if that’s what it is, it’s a hilarious bad approach.
The graphics look good for 2004, which isn’t surprising since it’s a combination of pre-rendered graphics and line art. Some parts of the game look really nice — better than the rest, which already looks really good — and I wonder if any of it is hand-painted or digitally painted.
More generally, I really like island settings and this reminds me that I should try to get through Blue Lacuna again. Can anyone recommend any other island games (IF or otherwise)?