After playingThe Witness I've been in the mood for some more puzzley games, so I started playing The Sinking Island. It was designed by Benoît Sokal (who also designed Syberia) so I figured it must be pretty good. At first, I thought I had discovered a hidden gem. The story is intriguing, the voice acting is good, the idea is somewhat original. The game itself is beautiful; it's set in this art deco hotel on a stormy tropical island, and the pre-rendered backgrounds are stunning. The game is basically your classic Cluedo murder mystery: an old millionaire is murdered, and this isolated resort is populated by a dozen scheming aristocrats; you're a detective and it's your job to figure out what happened by interviewing people, looking for clues, solving puzzles, etc. As you progress through the game the plot unfolds, the mysteries deepen, you start to figure out the dark history of this group of people, all while the island itself is slowly sinking.

So, on paper it all sounds good. But when I first opened the game I was alerted by the first warning sign: the game has two modes: easy mode or normal mode. What's the difference? Well, in "normal mode" you're playing against the clock. In this mode, events continue to transpire regardless of whether you solve the puzzles/clues or not. For example, if you fail to catch Colonel Mustard washing the blood off his hands in the dining room, well, you're screwed and you're at an unannounced dead end. I don't understand why on earth they would add such a feature to a game like this. Puzzle games are supposed to be relaxing and contemplative; the idea of playing something like Myst with a countdown timer in the corner is nauseating.

So, I put the game on baby mode and continued. I explored the beautiful island and the mysterious hotel, spoke to all the people, went around taking finger prints and collecting random inventory items like paper clips and empty wine bottles. But eventually I found myself at a dead end. This game suffers from a horrible illness that has plagued adventure games since the dawn of gaming history: pixel hunting. This hotel/resort/island is literally gigantic and to progress in this game you need to collect certain absurd items, without any hints. This involves visiting each individual "screen," and slowly running your cursor over every single pixel until the cursor changes, indicating that there's slightly discoloured pebble that you need to collect on one of the 12 beach scenes, for a totally unrelated puzzle hours later in the game. The whole thing is filled with horribly-designed nightmares like this.

I was willing to tolerate it up to a point. But then things worsened significantly. I was stuck again, at a later point. I had meticulously hovered my cursor over every pixel in the game, searched hundreds of cupboards, drawers, closets, spoken to every character, and I was completely stumped. I gave up and peeked at a walkthrough. Hours ago, during pixel-hunting, I had collected a butter knife from one of the hundreds of tables on the multi-level dining area. It turns out that you have to somehow psychically know to use this item on a particular empty drawer in an office on the 20th floor of the hotel. This is one drawer out of hundreds of empty drawers in the game. This reveals a secret compartment, allowing you to progress. There are no hints indicating that there might be any hidden compartments in that office/drawer. This is the point where I rage-quit and immediately uninstalled the game.

This just seems like extremely lazy game design to me. Creating puzzles that are so completely absurd and unsolvable (without a walkthrough). No logic, reasoning or intelligence would lead anyone to this solution. The only way to arrive here would be either pure luck or perhaps brute force trial and error. This experience has made me realise how special games like The Room and The Witness truly are.

There are many games in this genre that manage to circumvent the pixel-hunting altogether: allow the player to hold down a key (often Alt, Ctrl or Shift) which will immediately highlight all the interactive hotspots on the screen. A good example of this is Black Mirror. This means that pixel hunting is removed and the player can spend their time solving puzzles instead. Though even if it had a "hotspot" feature, The Sinking Island would still be a horrible disaster. I award it 1 star. Worth checking out briefly to see the beautiful island and the stylish interiors but the game itself is pretty much unplayable.