Adventure games appear to be cropping up on Kickstarter almost faster than we can keep up with these days. One of the latest point and click adventures is called The Mystery of Oak Island, and it’s based on a real life mystery surrounding treasure beneath Oak Island, Canada. The legend of Oak Island apparently began in 1795, when three men discovered a strange stone with hieroglyphs that indicated a great treasure. For many years after that people searched for it, to no avail. If you want more details on the legend, there’s a website out there on the stuff.
While that is all very interesting, does The Mystery of Oak Island look worthwhile? It’s important to note that this is the second attempt at funding this project by Visionaire Studio. I confess I was skeptical at first. While the graphics are of fairly good quality, and the premise seems interesting enough, the gameplay sounds rather typical of an adventure game. That might seem like an odd thing to nitpick over, but as mentioned, there seems to be a resurgence of point and click games as of late, and I suppose I’d like to start seeing more of them attempt to break the mold a bit. The Mystery of Oak Island is already promising many classic adventure game features, such as inventory puzzles and dialogue trees. Still, the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” comes to mind. Really, all Visionaire Studio has to do, is do it right.
With support from adventure game masters as Charles Cecil (creator of the Broken Sword series) and Jan Theysen (creator of the Book of Unwritten Tales series) The Mystery of Oak Island is at least worth a look. On the first day, they raised over €5,600 of their €15k goal at the time this article was written. That is certainly a decent start!
Track the progress of the Mystery of Oak Island Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
I backed it the first time around and I put my money into it a second time. I really do hope it makes it this time.