This Island is Trying to Kill You

The Simpsons is responsible for so much at this point that it feels hubristic to pick out one thing and call it the Simpsons Effect, but since from the state of the world it sure feels like the Furies have been sending out-of-office autoreplies for a while now, let’s risk some lightning bolts: due to having watched a bunch of the Simpsons when I was relatively tender-aged, there is a whole host of pop culture that I first encountered, and remain primarily if not exclusively familiar with, via Simpsons parodies. I’ve never seen the Shining or Cape Fear or Rear Window, but beyond the broad outlines of the plots I know many of the key setpieces and even how they were shot, based on seeing them played out by a cast of oddly-yellow cartoon characters. On the one hand, the Simpsons Effect really is an efficient way of expanding one’s cultural horizons – I can keep up in a conversation about the psychosexual themes of the Shining so long as I remember Groundskeeper Willie wasn’t actually involved – but on the other, that expansion is based on unstable foundations, an impression of someone else’s impression of a thing.

So anyway This Island is Trying to Kill You unabashedly presents itself as a homage to, specifically, shareware text adventures of the mid-1980s. I was 4 or 5 for most of the mid 80s, so what with not having a computer and not being literate, this isn’t an area where I have any firsthand knowledge, and I don’t even have any years-later experience, either – I’ve gone back to play some Infocom games, but even a quick glance at Island’s garish colors, integrated ASCII mazes, and cheerful use of the nether depths of the character set make clear that we’re a far way afield from A Mind Forever Voyaging. But I have played stuff like And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (and its companion, Infinite Adventure) that similarly leverage period-appropriate visuals and interface elements to tweak a nostalgia I don’t actually have, but in service to different creative agendas and more modern design sensibilities.

And at least in this case, that’s great! I can’t say with any authority how well Island apes its inspirations, but the vibe definitely matches what I’ve seen in analogous projects – brief but enthusiastic prose, unselfconsciously old-school puzzles, a sprawling, low-density map, a light treasure-hunt premise, and that all-important interface. There’s a blue header with your score and exits listed (of course there’s a score), a dappled-purple footer that occasionally pops up a light hint, your commands get typed in in cyan with error messages colored red, and there are lots of puzzles that bring in wingdings-style symbols to liven things up, not content to stick to the alphanumerics. It makes for a coherent aesthetic that wouldn’t be out of place on someone’s bedroom C64 in the background of a schmaltzy 80’s movie, but it’s also very functional: you have all the information a modern player has come to expect, the parser is fast and boasts some nice features like an optional autocomplete for longer words, and there’s an in-game automap to help make sense of the sometimes-wacky geography (oh, and there are deaths but they’re all reversible with a simple UNDO).

The other more contemporary touch is a dash of roguelike DNA – the ABOUT text indicates that there’s some randomization at play, jumbling up some of the layout and puzzle solutions between runs. I only went through it the once, but can see where things like safe combinations and the location of some items (like the mysterious ship’s wheels) could be changed, though I don’t think this would add much replayability since the basic contours of the solutions seem like they’d be the same – I am curious whether there are a few larger-scale alterations, though, as I ran into at least one obstacle that I never figured out how to circumvent (Spoiler - click to show)(the shark-infested lagoon).

We’re almost 700 words in and I haven’t said what the game is about yet, but the premise is somewhat besides the point: you’re shipwrecked on a desert island and need to collect a bunch of treasures because a talking porpoise (?) tells you you need to buy a ticket off the island (?) from a magic underground vending machine (?) that extends you credit based on the off-screen bank account you’ve accumulated by finding the aforementioned treasures and handing them off to a handy crab who appraises them and whisks them away for safekeeping (???) Basically: solve 17 puzzles, win the game. Some of these are beyond straightforward – unlock the box with a monkey on it using the key with a monkey on it – but there are also a couple simple math puzzles, some combinations to collect, and straightforward object manipulation challenges.

There’s nothing that’s especially tough, but the fact that the clues and items are spread over such a large map makes it satisfying to recognize that now you can go back and solve something you ran into much earlier. The extensive real-estate – which also includes a couple of evocative sub-areas – makes exploration fun, too, as you uncover the island’s secrets and get a sense of how it all fits together. Meanwhile, the prose is zippy and the jokes solid, with the unexpected result of trying to feed a seagull so it’d stop bothering me getting an out-loud laugh. And as mentioned above, despite appearances the interface is smooth enough to remove most friction. I did run into a couple of small bugs (the help text for interacting with characters seems to be missing, and trying to save the game threw an error, though I’ve been having issues with Itch.io in Chrome, so that could be the culprit), but those didn’t affect my enjoyment in the slightest.

I suspect that people who remember the 80s and played innumerable games like this in their formative years will get more out of This Island is Trying to Kill You. But even for those of us for whom it won’t be a madeleine evoking younger days, there’s a lot to enjoy here – actually, this might be a case where the Simpsons Effect second-hand version is way better than the original inspiration.