Tristam Island

Labrande does two impressive things in this large exploration adventure.

First, he reveals the central mystery piecewise to the player as they explore. That's not unusual, but Labrande manages to stay fully in control of the pacing of the narrative despite the game having an open and non-linear feeling, including multiple solutions to several of the puzzles.

The other impressive accomplishment is making a game that feels old-school, yet has many of the conveniences expected of modern games. There is no way to get stuck, puzzles offer multiple solutions, hints are provided generously to those carefully studying the environment, and items required for solving puzzles are mostly nearby. Once a section is completed, the player is not required to travel back to it, even though with one exception they can. The puzzles are overall fairly easy; I'm not good at puzzlers, and I only had to reach for three hints, two of which were because I failed to sufficiently examine the environment; clues were provided in-game to those who would look. The room layout follows reasonable logic. This makes the game -- despite its size -- very tractable.

Throughout the game, you sense there are several mechanisms that were cut from the design, either to keep the scope down or to keep the game more accessible. For example, the flashlight says something about conserving battery when turned off, but as far as I can tell, the batteries cannot run out. Similarly, the device found underground could have been put to good use, but ends up being decorative. It would have been interesting to play the game in a hard mode with such mechanisms enabled.

The only thing that makes me hesitate to give Tristam Island a very high mark relates to storytelling. The pacing and theme was excellent, but I'm disappointed in regards to immersion and the way the game ends. Immersion first: when I washed up on the island at the start of the game, I was hoping for tropical island immmersion the way I got from Plundered Hearts, but it never quite happened. I think maybe my expectations were unfairly high -- it is hard to match the tone and prose of Amy Briggs, plus with the size of Tristam Island it would be hard to pack that level of immersion into the z3 format. The ending was expected, but it still left a bunch of loose threads untied, while pretending they were handled.

That said, I really enjoyed my time with this game. From a gameplay perspective, it hits a sweet spot for size, difficulty, and its blend of narrative and puzzle elements. Sure, there are cases of missing synonyms, objects that become impossible to reference due to naming conflicts, and descriptions that don't update to reflect the state of the world, but nothing that ended up being a practical problem in my playthrough.