The original title of Missing on Lost Island is Verschollen auf Lost Island - Germans seem to love this odd mix of languages (at least some of them, others hate it all the more). But I played the English version where English terms are not so surprising after all.

The story of Lost Island is rather unusual, I would even say crazy. It all starts on a quiet night... Tim (that is, you) and his girlfriend Diana are walking home from the theater. They notice some movement in a dark alley. Several suspicious men seem to be loading something onto a cart. They seem to be dressed like 17th or 18th century pirates and one of them even has a peg leg. Oops, the man with the wooden leg notices Tim and Diana and attacks. Surprisingly, his weapon of choice is not a saber or a flintlock pistol but some sort of laser gun! Diana is hit but isn't visibly hurt - but she is enveloped in a sparkling electrical field and after a while simply vanishes. Only her evening dress remains. Tim fights some more but in the end he's zapped as well. Not very good, and that's only the intro.

As the game starts, you're in a large pit maybe 20 feet deep, location unknown. And you're completely naked - how embarrassing! After securing makeshift clothing and getting out of the pit, you walk into a nearby village. Whatever year it is, it certainly isn't the 1990s, let alone the third millennium. Piracy seems to be a popular occupation (the high seas kind, not the software variety) and you must have gone several hundred years into the past. The mysterious weapon apparently transported you not only in space but in time as well.

That means you have a lot to do: find your girlfriend Diana, get back home and get back (or rather forward) to your time. If you thought this was weird, rest assured that it'll get even weirder. At the end you'll probably be more confused than at the beginning. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The interface of Lost Island is classical point and click and quite simple - or restrictive, if you look at it from another angle. Right mouse button pops up the inventory which shows all items at once without a need to scroll through them. Simple and effective. The graphics are likewise traditional and fully 2D, with slightly cartoonish look. Sadly, the game seems to lack consistent graphical style and the quality is in my opinion below average.

Musical score consists of several tracks that are played sequentially in a loop. You can choose between "Modern" and "Pirate" style. Neither is particularly remarkable. The voiceovers are perhaps the weakest part of the game. The cast seems to have consisted of a whopping one person, and it shows. I've actually seen at least one game with excellent voiceovers done by a single person, but it certainly wasn't Lost Island. As if that wasn't bad enough, the translation from German is sometimes rather strange and some of Tim's utterances don't make a whole lot of sense. It may have been on purpose but I doubt it.

The puzzles are more or less logical although the logic is sometimes a little twisted. But that's okay because the game is not very serious. Most puzzles are inventory based but not all of them - there is one little 'sink the ship' game and also a maze (do you hate mazes?). The labyrinth isn't really very large or complex but it is nevertheless quite confusing thanks to the somewhat unconventional point of view. The puzzle difficulty is moderate and your life will be complicated by the fact that you'll be carrying a lot of objects even when they're no longer useful.

The story of Lost Island is a mix of sci-fi and old-time pirate elements. Most of the game takes place in the past but there's some jumping back and forth in time to keep you confused. The gameplay is fairly linear, with Tim progressing through several not too large areas - and the game as a whole isn't very long. Most of the time Tim is exploring lost islands which means that there is only a very small amount of dialogue. At several points in the game the story branches into two separate paths but they always merge again later - as far as I could tell, it doesn't really matter which path you take. There are however multiple (at least four) endings ranging from catastrophic to happy.

On the whole I wasn't very impressed by Missing on Lost Island. The premise of the story is certainly interesting and the game is funny in places. But somehow it just didn't "click" for me. Most of the time I wasn't really certain what I should be doing at the moment and was just aimlessly wandering around in the hope that something somewhere has changed. In the absence of engaging gameplay, many games at least have good looking graphics or great music, but I'm afraid Lost Island doesn't have even that. Taking all this into account, the final score can't be better than a C-.

Final Grade: C-

Missing on Lost Island is currently not available for purchase. Inca Gold has promised to inform Just Adventure when this situation has changed.

System Requirements:

• Pentium 100 MHz
• Windows 95/98/ME/XP/2000
• 64 MB RAM
• Direct X compatible graphic card
• Sound card
• CD-ROM drive
• Keyboard and mouse