From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to expose random games. This week a detective mystery you might call the Dark Souls of adventure games… except at least Dark Souls had a decent translator on its side.
Consider the bullet well and truly bitten. Maupiti Island is one of those games that has been on my list for years, and I mean that literally. Knowing that it is obsessed with it. To actually play it, well, that’s another matter. To decipher its secrets, and I don’t even mean in terms of plot, it practically takes a Rosetta Stone – along with the standard adventurer supply of a very large bag of Malteasers. It only takes 10 minutes to finish, but it could be a matter of months or even years to get to the point where you can legitimately do that… and have a sense of what’s going on.
This is Maupiti Island, a murderous place of sin and confusion and pixel-hunting from which unwary visitors may never really find a mental escape. Well, at least that’s how it was before the internet. Hooray for walkthroughs, eh?
This is the sequel to another adventure game, Mortville Manor, both of which are Jereme Lange mysteries – Lange is a private detective who initially looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart and literally sounds like a Speak and Spell. In that game you were in a mansion to help an old friend, while in this game you get caught in a cyclone and forced to dock your boat on the titular island of unavoidable mystery. More precisely, a girl named Marie has gone missing, the island has an old secret and Lange has nothing better to do with his time for a while, so agrees to help. So far, so every detective adventure. Laura Bow, Cruise For a Corpse, Hopkins FBI… it’s all pretty standard genre stuff.
At least, until you get to the detailswhere the plot soon thickens like cheap custard.
Maupiti Island was an attempt to create a more realistic kind of detective story, and to pay tribute, it was damn ambitious for 1990. These were great graphics, and this was one of the most intricately detailed environments available for poking and prodding. The entire game is played in pseudo-real time, with characters constantly moving around the island (admittedly, only shown via a cast list on the side of the screen), and they even talk! Well, they talk a little bit. You know how sometimes you get an idea, and it’s a really bad idea, but at that point you’re so busy actually doing it that the sheer, inescapable, suffocating badness of the idea doesn’t seem to matter anymore? That’s the only reason I can think of why Lankhor decided to use all of their characters text-to-speech-to-voice.
How has this never caught on? It’s a mystery. Fortunately, the writing style makes up for that. Just kidding, no it doesn’t. It’s not often that I find “too much information” during a detective game, but Maupiti Island succeeds.
But here’s the thing. Behind this horrible gimmick and one of the worst interfaces ever inflicted on the genre, and poor translation and a psychopathic aversion to player guidance and instant death traps that pop up out of nowhere and wait a while, where was I going with that? Oh yeah. Behind all of that is a surprisingly diabolical adventure. A long way behind, admittedly, but still.
In particular, Maupiti Island attempts what few other adventure games do: simulate a world rather than fill one with puzzles. It’s much more free-form than its obvious counterpart, The Colonel’s Bequest by Roberta Williams, with endlessly more depth and substance than Jordan Mechner’s wonderful The Last Express. Both games are, I would say, ultimately betterif only because you can play them without feeling like an ice pick is stuck in your eye.
And when one Sierra Online Adventure from Roberta “Murderpen” Williams is “the friendly one”, you know, Maupiti Island is not messing around. After all, The Colonel’s Bequest would kill you for using the shower (opens in new tab)despite no one in the mansion feeling the need to kill the protagonist.
It is technically possible to complete Maupiti Island without ever leaving the cabin of your boat. You’re really only there because of a storm, and if you just sleep through the entire adventure, eventually the authorities come and you can go on your way with nothing but the feeling that a designer somewhere is sobbing.
If you’re more active, it’s possible to travel all over the island from the start, tracking people to track their movements… at least until they catch you. You can bribe them. You can try to beat them up. You can take notes of things that happen to throw in their faces, with an entire conversational system built around debating: contradictions, bribes, showing evidence, and trying to punch people. While this doesn’t go well most of the time, it only yields tired responses like “You sure know how to talk to the ladies” and Lange’s punches are so weak that the only person he actually hits knocks himself out… of exhaustion.
No joke. He exhausts himself to the point of collapsing as they just stand there and sigh, presumably depositing his comatose body into the sea when he’s done. And sometimes he just gets killed because it sucks to be him.
However, as time ticks, things happen whether you’re around or not. One of the islanders is fished out of the sea and another body appears on the beach. Since you can’t be everywhere, it’s important to question other characters about what they’ve seen in certain time periods, and slowly… very, very slowly… gather a vague idea of what’s going on and what trying to convey the terrible English translation.
Even if it makes sense, it’s mostly robot stuff, not helped by the fact that the characters literally sound like robots, with lots of options that seemingly don’t answer and about a billion things to remember. You don’t just say “What were you doing the night of the disappearance?” Oh no, instead you can ask every character about every hour between the start of the game and the end, as well as every one other character and their take on each plot point from the bodies starting to appear to the backstory of the island itself. And wow, does it have to! Bring a notebook or four.
Why? Not just because you want to understand the plot, although that helps. See, when the developers made Mortville Manor, they realized it was possible to solve it in about five picoseconds if you just did the necessary puzzles. So to actually win the game you also had to pass a quiz. Maupiti Island does the same thing, letting you go to the very last location and then prompting about a billion questions about every little bit of the story before finally giving you access to the ending. And oh, what an ending it is! How generously all this effort is rewarded! With a letter from the stray Marie saying, “Yes, this princess is in another castle. Maybe see you in the next game!”
And yes, there was another game on the schedule. After that somewhat less explosive finale, there is a whole second text screen it pretty much just goes “Well that’s that, all’s well that ends well. Next game, Japan!” Though that never happened possibly because the name was supposed to be “Soukiya” and even at the time marketing people knew there would never be a soukiya sequel other than Duke Nukem Forever.
It’s hard to think of an adventure less fun or enjoyable than this one, and that’s saying something when you consider that a) I’ve played Shadowgate and b) I really hate missing out on an opportunity to snark at Myst’s expense. But it’s true. From the translation to the interface, Maupiti Island is a painful experience that doesn’t seem to know the meaning of reward. It’s a masochist playground, where the only toy is a Rubik’s Cube covered in razor blades.
If something can be done badly, chances are Maupiti Island will do it terriblebe it spewing hateful error messages when you try to perform basic actions, or the first class with awards in pixel bitching from Frustration University. Maupiti? Ha. It has no Unfortunately.
But.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…
Despite all that, there is method in its madness, and if you’re willing to embrace it, there’s plenty of charm in its narration. If anything, the robot voices that make it so hard to take the characters seriously lighten up the gruff dialogue with frequent giggles, and that’s before noticing the odd innocence of Lange’s room descriptions. Not for him, a beautiful garden is just a garden. Instead it’s “For original sin…” A pier becomes “Ship of Fools”. As he approaches a well, he quietly mutters to himself, “I wish I may, I wish I could,” and at that moment it’s so easy to imagine him pausing in the tropical heat to smile to himself for a joke no one else has heard or would. found funny, and be OK with that.
But more importantly, if you take the time to grab that notebook and pen, Maupiti Island is as close to a detective as any game. Nothing is handed to you on a plate. If it served you hot stew for dinner, it would dump it into your hands, ignore your cries of pain, and innocently ask if you want the salt. It’s true that the other characters are ridiculously willing to spout their life stories at the stranger, from regretted virginity to full-blown breakdowns of who exactly they want to see stick a cactus up their anus and sit on a rock.
Aside from that necessary conceit, all you discover is because it’s you Discover it, not because you solved a puzzle. You’ve also discovered it in a living world that manages to feel alive, even with its characters usually existing as nothing more than names in a list next to the (beautifully drawn for the time) environments, with the basic script that really doesn’t. It doesn’t work minute by minute and at least gives way to a lot to discover and put together.
Does this mean I recommend playing it? Honestly No.
But I’m glad I did have. At least that’s worth something.
Here’s the version of the story where Lange is psychic and doesn’t need any of your puzzling clues to solve the mystery. There is a more extensive version on YouTube, but unfortunately it is in French (opens in new tab). Alternatively, if you dare, you can track down a specimen yourself. You’ll hate it. You might also love it. You can do both at the same time. But either way, I can guarantee you’ll never play anything like it again.
(And if you do, here’s a good walkthrough (opens in new tab). Don’t mention it.)
