Malayalam - Island of Mysteries

[eMTe]

The game is a vague crossover between a Robinson Crusoe themed survival game and a mysterious adventure similar to the TV series Lost, presented in a cartoonesque style with hand-drawn graphics and animation.

The player controls a character named Thomas Paine, a 34-year old fisherman, who has shipwrecked somewhere in the Eastern Indian Ocean. He drifts onto an unknown desert island named Malayalam, where the adventure takes place. The initial goal for the player is to stay alive and secure sufficient living conditions to enable further progress in the game. This involves finding food, hunting, constructing tools, building shelters, sleeping, and other everyday activities on the island.

The second goal is about solving quests, which are often some sort of puzzle or riddle presented to the player in form of pergaments and bottle posts. In these, the player needs to seek solutions using objects or information he has discovered on the island. The ultimate goal is to solve all missions on the island, and find a way off.

The game awards Malayalam Points for each day survived and for each quest solved. Players can compete with each other in an online highscore table, which ranks every contender by the number of Malayalam Points earned. Other than that, Malayalam – Island of Mysteries is purely a single-player game.

Developer: MJK Games

Download:

http://www.curlysworldoffreeware.com/games/view/432

[Chroelle]

Sounds a bit like Stranded 1 and 2 too.
http://curlysworldoffreeware.com/game_i ... gameid=141
http://curlysworldoffreeware.com/game_i ... gameid=235

[Drasir-Vel]

Yes, i thought that too

[eMTe]

I wanted to add "for Stranded fans" line, but decided to leave this pleasure for others.

[eMTe]

From e-mail:

"...expect Abstractica 3, Picross Mania and Hanjie Puzzle Challenge (...) re-released as freeware during May-June."

I write it here through lack of better place. In case I forget. And since I'll forget anyway - you dont forget that I wrote it here.

[Chroelle]

CAn anyone actually run this game? I started the game up and get to the place where I can choose New Game or Start Tutorial, and nothing happens when I click either. I tried both clicking the picture and the little button under the pic... Anyone? This game looks too good for me to just give up on.

[eMTe]

May be some kind of bug.

[Chroelle]

I am trying to figure it out by contacting them at the sites forum, and so far I have gotten responses, so I am hoping for a solution for this one. Can you run it eMTe?

[Chroelle]

You can follow the progress I amke here:
http://www.mjkgames.com/smf/index.php?topic=451.0

It seems I can skip the menu and go stargiht to the game by opening the Dir1 folder and pressing the exe file there. That worked so far, but could be buggy.

[Chroelle]

That showed out to work for the tutorial as well. You can simply access the original exe file and press what you want to do - play a game or play the tutorial. Then you exit the original game and go into the dir folder and press the miom.exe file and it starts up the game as you wanted it to.

This game is hard though. Be warned. If you thought Stranded and Stranded 2 was hard to figure out then this one is even worse.
This game feels like somebody played Stranded 2 and decided to make a similar game but with some improvements, and sadly also some glitches.
The fact that you can use an action like fishing as soon as you made a fishing pole and dont have to worry about carrying around a fishing pole all the time - just in case - is brilliant, but the feel to it is a bit wrong. The game isHUGE! Lots of places to go, and in the beginning you get confused by this, and a bit awestruck and a sa result end up dying right where you began your game not having left the screen more or less.
CAn easily be recommended, but I still prefer the Stranded sequel.

[Drasir-Vel]

At first i thought it was easy enough to survive in this game. I could get plenty of food. I knew i had to work fast at the start to secure a source of food and water, but that came somewhat easily. I later found out that i need to eat varied foods because if i used only one type, it wouldn't be enough, i would starve anyway.
First of all i needed a fire. That was easy enough, i found some wood and a match near the start point. However after some time, the match was used up and the fire went out. On the forum i read something about that you can get matches in a specific region of the island, but that was around 5 regions away, and i was starving.

[Pater Alf]

I might be a little dumb here, but how can I drink water? When I try it the same way I eat food (dragging the bottle to my character) I just leave the bottle on the ground every time.

Besides that I like the game so far. It's a lot like "Stranded" or other survival games, but playing this I don't feel that rushed. You have some time to think what to do next and that is a good thing in my eyes. Of course there are still many ways to die (damned sharks), so you can never feel save.
And I like the quests. With them the game feels much more than an adventure and not like a pure survival game.

[Pater Alf]

I think it's a little annoying that you die so fast if you don't get the right combination of nutrition. I mean be honest: Do you really starve within two days if you don't get meat???

[Drasir-Vel]

I also thought it was a bit unrealistically difficult.

[Pater Alf]

Following the logic of the game vegetarians would have a pretty short life span.

[eMTe]

I think they needed key gameplay element giving the game certain level of difficulty, but ended up in unrealisticness. Nothing's perfect.

[Pater Alf]

Sure, but I think they could've kept a certain difficulty and stayed realistic as well. It would've been great if you would get ill and loose energy after a while when you don't get the right nutrition mix. Still difficult and much more realistic. Starving with a full stomach is a little silly and makes the game a little frustrating after a while (because all is about hunting the right nutrition mix).

I probably wouldn't mind if there weren't so many elements in that game that I really like a lot. The big quest in the background and the many small quests for example. They make the game feel much bigger than the "normal" survival game.