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8.9 ultra recommended
If you want to give yourself a good scare, buy one of those Tiki masks and arrange it on a stick at the side of your bed one night. It will be the first thing you see when you wake up the next morning. You'll probably jump five feet!
You'll encounter a similar situation in the beginning of Escape From Paradise, a Virtual Villagers-type game from Toybox Games. The plot is like something out of a reality TV show: Your luxury Pacific cruise ship is plagued by a mysterious fog, forcing you and a handful of survivors to swim to a tiny Polynesian island. You awake on a magnificent sandy beach to find a native in a Tiki mask challenging you to cut down fifty wood. Fifty! Normally when someone wakes you up to cut wood, you grab your hat and run. But this is a mostly deserted island with nowhere to run to, and if you're planning to get home again you have to play along with the batty loose screw natives. ...so fifty wood it is!
At first it's just you and one other castaway, but as you repair a few huts and build a few more, working with the natives and meeting their challenges to obtain tools (like axes, shovels, fishing rods, etc.), other castaways will notice your progress and join your tribe. (You can rename them, which is fun.) Many hands make for light work, but don't forget to have one or more of your group gathering bananas and filling the banana bowl, because the more people you get, the more bananas you need to feed them. Plus these are really crunchy bananas so they don't provide as much nourishment as the kind you get from a cruise ship buffet line. Soon you'll be fishing and hunting for food, but in the beginning it's all bananas.
Gameplay involves clicking on a castaway to select him or her, and then dragging the mouse to another object to have them examine it or to set them working at a task. For example, you could drag to the pond to start someone fishing. Or drag over to a well to ask the selected tribe member to drink some water. A happy member of your tribe has four needs that must be met: thirst, hunger, sleep, and social. Crunchy bananas and well water meet the first two needs, while sending a castaway to a hut for a catnap and having them chat to a fellow castaway solve the latter two. If anyone becomes too miserable, they'll slump their shoulders and lurch around like zombies, finally refusing to work. The same thing happened to me once when someone dragged me to a concrete wall and told me to break it apart with a chisel and sledge hammer.
If Virtual Villagers is a snake, then Escape From Paradise is a snake that has swallowed gobs of minigames, with their outlines comically visible as it slithers past. From the start you'll find a bottle filled with infinite wordsearches, a Chuzzle clone, and a Diner Dash clone so brazen you have to see it to believe it. (Your castaways chop their way further into the island only to discover a diner for the natives. Preposterous! Later there's even a casino!) There are other, simpler minigames as well. Such as checkers, war, shuffleboard, sudoku, and a very basic one-on-one bridge combat game. You can tell that Toybox games put a lot of effort into the twelve minigames, and they do break up the monotony of watching your tribespeople hammer, hammer, hammer, chop, chop, chop. I dare say if you like watching people hammer, just buy Escape From Paradise now. Trust me, you'll love it.
As a reward for completing higher and higher minigame levels, you receive skill points. These can be assigned to a castaway to improve one or more skills: carpenter, provider, and lumberjack. As someone's skill in carpentry increases, they become faster at building structures like huts, wells, storage bins, etc. Skilled providers can pick more bananas and reel in more fish. And skilled lumberjacks can chop wood extremely fast. Completing the minigames isn't the only way to increase skills - castaways also gain points while carpentering, providing, and lumberjacking. AKA practice. It just takes longer. Annoyingly, the Tiki natives set a limit on the skill level your tribespeople can obtain. This limit has no basis in reality, which makes me think the island is some sort of supernatural whereabouts like the island in Lost.
Your goal is to make it back to civilization. Hidden on the island are ten radio pieces. If you can find them all and make it to the center of the island (the highest point), you call call for help. You get hints about the location of the pieces. Some hints can be tricky to work out, so put on your thinking cap.
The graphics in Escape From Paradise are very good, especially the cute castaways and the wide variety in their hair and clothes. They're deftly animated. But you can tell that Toybox Games took a few shortcuts in other areas. For example, characters sometimes walk in front of objects they should be behind. Even more amusingly, a pole on the bow of the shipwrecked S.S. Fantasy (or maybe another ship...) sticks upwards over the beach from the player's perspective, but is obviously just part of the static background graphic because tribespeople walk up and around it as if it was an obstacle.
There seems to be just one looping background song, but it's kind of catchy and won't make you slather peanut butter in your ears. Give Escape From Paradise a chance. The minigames are fun, especially the Chuzzle clone called "Shipwrecked," and you just might get addicted to watching your homesick castaways stand around and hammer.
Goooo Escape from paradise!
thats a huge mouthful…but its fun!
cool
omg I’m addicted to Virtual villagers, I got to play this!!
this is the coolist game ever seen i love this game Virtual villagers