Review of Return to Mysterious Island by Houie

Before I tried this game, I thought all 1st person adventure games were “Myst clones.” This game completely changed my perspective on it. The puzzle mechanics of this game are awesome. For those who are fans of item collection and combining, this is your dream come true! The introduction of a monkey companion and multi-item recipes is great. There is a great variety of puzzles ranging from (mostly) item puzzles, to logic puzzles, to trivia (I know, trivia may sound not so fun, but they way they incorporated it in to the story and gameplay was marvelous).

Great graphics (not surprising since it is Kheops who developed it), superb audio (so many ambient sounds in this game and voice acting is top notch). The story is minimal, so for story fanatics, this may not be your cup of tea.

One other thing is that the game is quite open ended, puzzles can be solved multiple ways, and some puzzles are even optional. I actually have created some interesting items in the game that I never got to use. So there is some definite replay value for completionists

However, I deducted some points due to the fact that I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with war and unnecessary violent conflict, but there was quite a bit of that toward the end.