I recently moved and this of course drove me to dive into my vast
game collection and weed out the bad apples. This unearthed long
lost loves and general oddities, collections of characters suited
for the Adventure Game sideshow. The game I shall be reviewing today
is most definitely the bearded lady of them all.

The Lost Island
of Alanna was released in 1998, amid the fervor that was the Myst-clone years.
(It’s a dirty term, but true.)
Designed as a promotion for Cherry Coke, Coca-Cola decided it would
be cool to make a Myst-like game that would involve their customers
to drink Cherry Coke and check out the Cherry Coke website to get
clues in order to proceed. They had even set up a chat room and published
clues in magazines to aid their explorers in their quest to discover
just what exactly was on the island of Alanna . . . and how the heck
did Cherry Coke fit into all of this?

Drink it and they will come

So, with a glass of Cherry
Coke next to my trusty notebook, I began to search this lost island.
I figured that Cherry Coke would aid
my search, provide me with some special ability that would enable
me to see beyond the circa 1998 flat graphics and unlabeled inventory
items. Would it open my ears to the sounds that weren’t there?
And suddenly make those journal entries appear that I would need
in order to solve the first puzzle? Nope . . . all I did was spill
it, make my desk sticky and find that post-it note that I written
down a walkthrough for the game on. So I guess it made me do something
. . . Windex my desk at any point.

Unfortunately, for those
just picking up Alanna now, you won’t
get very far without the journals that were previously published
on the Cherry Coke website. Thanks to the good folks at Balmoral
Software, you can find a walkthrough for the game that will provide
you with the information needed from the journals, but that might
ruin it for those who hate turning to such things.

Puzzles are the standard, giving us the usual cast of characters:
inventory, codes, sound matching, and of course, the dreaded slider
puzzle. The accompanying sound effects, the little that there are,
are annoying and at times even grating. The slider especially has
this stone-grinding sample that makes me want to tear my hair out.

Inventory puzzles involve
the combination of items, and this isn’t
quite as intuitive as you might think. In fact, the gent that I originally
purchased this game from attached a sticky that reads: “to
combine objects, hold shift key and click another item.” This
is because, well, there isn’t really a manual or Readme with
the game. As for the controls, there are standard for the first two
Journeyman games. Game play takes place in a square on the top half
of the screen, while four arrows in the bottom right hand corner
control the movement. One welcome bit were the comments at the top
of screen. While normally these say things like “this is a
rock” and “you can’t go that way,” sometimes
our unknown omniscient narrator provides with witty commentary. “Are
you trying to start a rock collection?” Or when I was blatantly
misusing inventory items “whip the thicket.”

But in the end, I felt like Ralphie from A
Christmas Story when
he gets the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, and all he gets for
his trouble is an advertisement for Ovaltine. The game is extremely
short and not really satisfying. In the end, we are enlightened with
how to read fortunes found on the Cherry Coke labels. Stop the presses!

What makes The
Lost Island of Alanna really important though is that at one point in popular
culture, large companies felt that Adventure
games were the ticket to advertising their product. They had faith
in the size of the audience to get their message across. Nowadays,
this game stands as a piece of nostalgia, kitschy amongst its older
brothers like Amber and Riven. Kitschy like a slap bracelet and jelly
shoes.

So what’s next?
Will Dreamfall have strategically placed advertisements for Big
Macs and Starbucks? It may not distract you for long, but
it might just save you money on your car insurance.

If you’d like to
get your own copy of The Lost Island of Alanna to add to your own
Video Game sideshow, may I recommend Gametz.com.

Final Grade: C
(find out more about our
grading system)