Bent Oak Island review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Plenty of laughs but not enough polish in this simple, straightforward retro-styled fetch quest adventure

My sister is ten years older than me. When I was young, she was away at boarding school during the weekdays. So I never really felt that close sibling bond with her, that back and forth banter, that daily interaction. I once threw a shoe at her but hit her bedroom mirror instead, and I was always a little bit afraid when my mom told me to go wake her up on Sunday mornings.

The Bent Oak Island heroes, Archer and Sam, have a much tighter relationship. In fact, they’re twins: Sam is the eldest by two minutes, which she never lets her brother Archer forget. In this classic retro-style point-and-click adventure, you mostly play as Archer, but during some dialogues his sister will take the lead – especially when it involves cute guys. This leads to many hilarious conversations that bind the game’s rather basic inventory puzzles and fetch quests together. The gameplay won’t pose much of a challenge, but even if you’re not nostalgic for the unapologetically old-fashioned graphics, you’ll still have fun with the brother-sister antics in this simple but well-written story. 

Chicago teenagers Archer and Sam arrive on the titular Island to visit their uncle. The last time they saw him they were only five years old, so naturally they’re a bit excited about the prospect of spending the summer with him. During their stay, they become intrigued by the big fire that wiped away most of the town a decade earlier. Looking into that part of the island’s history, they encounter a local guy named Ted, who’s studying seismic activity. Putting two and two together, they figure out something subterranean happened to cause the fire. Unfortunately, there are signs that history is about to repeat itself. Soon Archer and Sam are put on a world-saving quest, where everyone’s fate depends on their final decision.

Bent Oak Island has the appearance of a Sierra game from the late 80s – chunky pixels, bright colors – but with character sprites twice as large, which make them seem quite blocky. For console fans, developer Banefire Games describes the look as “somewhere between NES and SNES graphics.” Traditionalists might expect a text parser to accompany them, but the user interface is completely point-and-click. You cycle through the different cursor commands – use, talk and look – with the right mouse button. The talk cursor appears automatically when you hover over Sam, but this doesn’t happen with the NPCs. The inventory appears at the top of the screen when you move your cursor there. It also deactivates your cursor for some reason, resetting only after you right-click to choose a command, which can get frustrating after a while when scouring for hotspots near the top of the screen and accidentally moving your cursor that one pixel too high.

Each of the game’s seven chapters takes place in a new area of Bent Oak Island, though some acquired items carry over. Every location has a series of little inventory puzzles and fetch quests, all very intuitive and not at all hard. Solving them achieves a specific goal per chapter, like getting a motel room, locating the kids’ uncle in the island’s nature preserve, or finding a library book with information about the fire, which opens the way to the next chapter. Most take place in an urban area in town, with bright and lively colors for exterior settings, warm for interiors. Each scene is filled with many worldbuilding hotspots to look at and read funny descriptions of, and not everything is part of a puzzle. It’s a treat to explore this detailed world, and scanning the scenes for interactions never turns into an actual pixel hunt. 

Everything you need to do makes sense, with no moon logic involved, and the teen protagonists almost continuously give hints about the objects they encounter. Except for when I wanted them to say something. My only issue is the game’s complete silence when you try the wrong inventory item on something. It simply results in the item being returned to your inventory without triggering any comment whatsoever. It often made me repeat the attempt because I thought I did something wrong (which I did, of course, but not in that way).

It’s a good thing the twins are otherwise so chatty, because the strength of Bent Oak Island is the funny comments for every action you take. Almost every action, I should say, since you’ll soon grow tired of Archer exclaiming “I can’t do anything with that right now” over and over again when you try to use a hotspot that is only designed to look at (more so because that doesn’t always mean you can do something with it later). 

Bent Oak Island

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Savior
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Most of the fun lies in regularly clicking on Sam to chat and listen to her crazy stories. In each location the siblings have something different to talk about that is always good for a laugh, though they don’t contain any necessary information. You might think this is a missed opportunity to use the conversations as an in-game hint system, but the pair are already very generous with their clues during the automatic dialogues. Besides, the fetch quests and inventory puzzles you’ll encounter don’t really need much reflection to begin with.

Other than small animations like turning their heads sideways, the main characters never move. You change screens in a kind of slideshow fashion when using exits, and the protagonists are teleported to fixed locations amid the scenery. You’ll never see them walk or move closer to hotspots, even when they’re supposedly manipulating one. The backgrounds too only have small animations, such as little waves in the water around the island. There are limited sound effects as well, most of them animal noises like seagulls, a cat, or a raccoon. There’s definitely lots of wildlife on Bent Oak Island, even if it’s not very lively. It’s a shame that any sound effects are pretty much drowned out by the constant looping of happy music featuring piano, guitars and drums, with the sound of a live band performing between acts in a comedy club.

None of the characters are voiced, though a fishing sailor will give you a piratey “Arrr!” when he first talks to you. Dialogue boxes are always centered on the screen, featuring a small portrait of the person speaking beside it. Depicted in the same brightly colored pixel art style as the environments, these character heads often blend into the background, and sometimes I missed who was actually saying what. All dialogue flows with auto-advance, but it’s also possible to click through to the next line, which is handy for larger blocks of text you might be able to read faster. In conversations with secondary characters, dialogue options always remain in the list with nothing to indicate they’ve been asked, even when you’ve already done so. The text itself is riddled with typos, insofar that even words used twice in the same sentence are often spelled differently. It’s too bad, because the writing is indeed very funny, and all those spelling mistakes ruin the immersion.

There are lots of NPCs around the island, like a forest ranger, a librarian, several shopkeepers, and even a ghost and a “yeti.” Each character will have something you need, and you’ll spend most of the game finding the right items to trade. All seven chapters follow the same formula: you reach a new area on the island, explore all locations, pick up any available items, talk to everyone, then figure out who needs what. After the exploring is done and you know what to do, one thing quickly leads to another and it usually takes just one little push to make all dominos fall down, figuratively speaking.

At first everything you do is rather mundane, with just a couple of references to the great fire. Eventually, however, you finally discover the secrets of the island and the actual cause of the calamity. The game is given a more fantastical, supernatural vibe from that point on, and the leisurely fetch quests change into a race to stop disaster from striking again. The laid-back music gives way in the final act to a score with more of an epic, heroic style you might expect in a movie with elves and orcs. It’s a bit out there, perhaps, but the twins take it as it comes and never stop making some pop culture reference or another linked to what they encounter. Without spoiling anything, I can say that the influence new events have on the appearance of a previously explored area of the island is extremely well done.

The game employs a manual save system, though it’s limited to five slots. You can’t label your save files, and neither do they include a thumbnail of your current location. They are date-stamped, but an actual timestamp would’ve been even handier. The developer states that there are “two main endings, with a third secret ending that requires numerous optional puzzles to be completed”. While playing, I noticed a pretty fixed linearity to the puzzles and no real choices to be made, until I reached the final location and I could indeed choose between two possible outcomes. That’s a perfect place to save. For that third ending I didn’t have to do anything special; it turns out I’d already done the optional puzzles during the natural course of events, and all it meant is that I wound up with an extra inventory item to use in a particular, readily available location in the final chapter. Out of the three, there’s only one obvious and quite satisfying ending; the other two were actually a bit of a letdown.

Final Verdict

Bent Oak Island is very rough, and not just around the edges. Limited animation and sound effects, a glitchy user interface, and loads of spelling mistakes prevent you from being completely absorbed by the story and its puzzles. And yet there is certainly some fun to be had, especially in the writing. The sibling chemistry is hilarious, and the multitude of silly NPCs are good for many laughs as well. And while the 80s-style graphics are not exactly to my personal tastes, I’m sure there are many old-school gamers who will appreciate its nostalgic charm. The story starts out all in innocent good fun, but eventually the stakes are dramatically raised, with lots more hanging in the balance, concluding with a somewhat fulfilling ending to five hours of breezy adventuring. A little more depth and some additional polish would have gone a long way, but even with its limitations, it’s made me start to miss having a sibling by my side, “enriching” my life by commenting on everything we see and do. Perhaps I’ll give my sister a call, and hope she’s not still mad about the shoe. 

Johnny played Bent Oak Island on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.