Return to Mysterious Island

I played this Return To Mysterious Island awhile ago and a few more times since. This game plays up the Jules Verne motif hence the title. I enjoyed playing a female character. The puzzles are essentially pretty straight forward expect for a couple that you say what the "bleep" to. The puzzles are more like real world objectives, i.e.(I need food -- Fishing rod = Fish). I don't want to spoil the story so I am choosing what I say carefully. The story line is very well written. There I didn't ruin it. So go play it. You will enjoy it, especially if this is your genre.

This game has some great inventory puzzling (item combining) mechanics, and has some slick visuals, but I just didn't find it very immersive; your character's narration is poor and corny, and a lot of what you're doing is very banal and boring. There isn't a particular sense of mystery or suspense to drive you onwards, which makes it hard to stay engaged. It's not bad by any means, and it's a decent offering to the genre, it just doesn't have enough character compared to the great games that really suck you in to their universe. Also, the Mac version seems to lock up sometimes so that the controls become unresponsive; I FINALLY managed to slingshot all the damn monkeys when this happened to me, making it impossible to save. The lack of an autosave feature as well is disappointing, as the need to save isn't particularly obvious, nor is the option readily accessible.

Very nice game, you can complete it with several different ways using couple, not one, objects to complete tasks. Puzzle are logical, I lost one time because I don't pickup some things, but I was know want I'm missing. It's worth to play.

Return to Mysterious Island is pretty much the definition of a budget adventure game-graphics are poor, menu options are non-existent, animation is rare, & you spend your hours moving in a slideshow, searching for hotspots. In fact, graphics are so poor, you rarely know what's interactable, forcing you to comb the screen. Some things look like you need to collect them, but are scenery, & certain seemingly reachable areas are blocked off by invisible walls. As far as path selection goes, the game is incredibly linear, but the bad graphics means you'll backtrack a lot having missed something. A decent plot could have saved me some aggravation, but there isn't any. This game is a mindless collect-a-thon. Granted, you can solve puzzles for the fun of it, but the puzzles are fairly straightforward, not offering much reward. You do become better at the game as you progress, but it isn't any less frustrating. Trying to solve a simple puzzle, I had to solve it exactly the way the game's creators intended me to. Granted, this game has a crafting system that allows you to use several items for the same purpose, making the game less difficult, but not less rigid. Finding a shallow pool with a fish in it, it looked like my character could grab it by hand. But instead I needed to create a rod & bait it. And having collected about 20 items I could use to catch that fish, I'm still missing the one item I need to create my fishing rod. It seems that this game being a slideshow, the character can't even try alternative solutions to the puzzles, or even comment on them. It's the game's way or the highway. Getting so frustrated, I ended up trying everything on everything else, to try to advance. After all, the puzzles may be simple, but their solution lacks common sense. E.g., seeing a broken staircase, instead of climbing, you need to fashion bricks & rebuild the stairs. It's a shame, since the inventory is fairly well designed, with separate areas for items & semi-crafted items.

It's one of my comfort games I like to fall back to when I need a feel-good story; the pre-rendered backgrounds aged very well and the crafting mechanics are still a lot of fun