While Return to Mysterious Island falls a bit short of "epic", it does deliver decent doses of adventure...
The game opens as Mina, our intrepid adventurer, washes up on the shores of "Mysterious Island". Understandably, she's a bit famished, and you are immediately set in search of food. From the onset of the game, the logical nature of the puzzles become apparent; the game deftly avoids the ubiquitous problem of arbitrary puzzle play. As you set about the task of finding nourishment, you'll quickly discover another nice feature: most problems have more than one solution, and the game rewards ingenuity with "bonus points". Of course, this is an adventure game, so getting the grub isn't as straightforward as it might initially seem, but it's not laughably difficult either.
Even brief exploration will reveal some of the genre's most beautiful scenery. The graphics do excellent justice to the game's setting of a lush island in the South Pacific; sandy beaches, lush inlands, even a gorgeous lake are all delightfully beautiful. There's not much to speak of in the way of music, but it actually works here as it emphasizes the deserted nature of the island. The ambient sound is fitting and relevant; when Mina is in a cave, her voice seems to echo off the walls. Coconuts fall from trees with solid, earthy thuds. The miniscule amount of voice acting, mostly in the form of Mina thinking aloud, is well executed and manages to avoid the cheesy overacting that plagues so many other games.
Unfortunately, like most adventure games, Mysterious Island does have a few weak points. The multiple-solution feature means you'll likely end up with tons of inventory that you never use. So much so, in fact, that when the game ended, I felt a bit cheated. I had such a cool array of promising inventory, I thought there were still a good handful of puzzles left. The sheer volume of inventory can often get a bit unwieldy to manage, especially if you start combining items and forget that they're in the assembly area rather than the "stock". There are few screens that don't have at least one item to pick up, if not half a dozen.
The game is also a bit short. The end game seems to hint at other puzzles that lie ahead (and some quite promising sounding ones, at that) so I was truly stunned when I realized the game was over. Even as the final cutscene played, I thought some incident would occur that would require a bit more puzzling. But mostly, my disappointment was simply based on the fact that the game was a visual and mental delight (if you can get over a few glaring anachronisms that really don't quite fit into the world of Captain Nemo).
A dash of adventure, a liberal dose of fun, well integrated puzzles and beautiful scenery make Return to Mysterious Island a fun jaunt, if only for an afternoon.