Designer: Inka and Markus Brand

Artist: Silvia Christoph, Michaela Kienle, Franz Vohwinkel

Publisher: KOSMOS

SPOILER ALERT: STOP! DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME.

There are plenty of reviews of this game out there that are spoiler free. This is not it. I am going to directly discuss about the game and the puzzles. You have been warned!!

This is the 11th game in the series we have played, almost all exclusively with 2 players. However, as my kid is growing older, she is insisting that we include her in the EXIT series games. The Forgotten Island has 3 pips in its difficulty level and is considered an Expert level game. As expected, most of the puzzles were a little over her head, but she enjoyed flipping the riddle cards, reading them and operating the puzzle wheel. All in all the 11th game had decent, solid puzzles, but rather unremarkable.

The narrative for Forgotten Island is quite generic… and forgettable. You get marooned on an island with pirate treasure and have to figure out a way to liberate the treasure and find an escape route. As with other games in the series, the structure and cadence of the game play is pretty much the same. However, more than any other game in the series, I am beginning to understand how the games are rated by different difficulty levels. The primary obstacle we constantly face was – do we have enough cards to solve the puzzle or are we missing some vital information? To be honest, this is slightly cheesy way to boost the difficulty of the game. It is not always hard, but sometimes more annoying that you can’t tell if you have collected enough of the riddle cards to piece the puzzle together. In Forgotten Island, you get a multiple pieces of the puzzle scattered throughout the game. In fact, I believe in the second puzzle alone, you already receive pieces meant for the final puzzle. So you end up spend half the time wondering if you need the other half of the time to solve an unsolvable puzzle. Luckily, the first solution card is often enough to get us out of the bind as they always indicate which riddle cards must be flipped over to solve the puzzle. Still, I find that bordering annoying and not really our fault. Once you know you have the adequate cards to solve the puzzle, then things start to fall in place and become clearer.

Some notable puzzles:

“Plus”: This is the one my kid liked the most. You have individual stencils that must be put on a flat surface to shade out the regions. If you collect all four pieces and shade the regions, the non-shared area will reveal the number “146”. She was impressed how the information was fragmented into 4 stencils that would only show the info when combined.

“Hexagon”: This was an easy one which my kid solved. If you lift up the page, the obstructions from the flip side of the page makes it easy to spot the numerals highlighted on the first page. Actually, she discovered this by error.

“Y”: Also not a hard puzzle. It was pretty clear you have to fold one of the pages and place it on another page to fit the lightning pattern. When viewed from an angle, the folded page revealed the number 924. A very typical EXIT game clue. Took us a sec to guess this.

“Square”: Also an easy clue. By now, you would have to realized that all “Bolded” or Underlined clues need extra special attention. Once we figured that out, we quickly realized that we need to focus on “DIE” and choose the corresponding coordinates to match up on the puzzle wheel. Easy. The only tricky part is to realize that the dial compass needs to be rotated in a way that dial on a safe is rotated.

“Star”: Probably more annoying than it is hard. It was quickly clear you need to read each one from each source in order to reveal the clues. The clue cards are pretty straight foward for that. No mystery at all.

“Moon”: Probably the hardest of all the puzzles. Here, you have to realize that the page in the journal is telling you to find the corresponding item in each of the 3 empty locations. Once you realize that, then it is a matter of finding the source of the clues. Perhaps most folks don’t realize that each of those spots is an entirely new puzzle spread across multiple game pieces. That was what took us the most time – figure out which puzzle corresponded to what. Overall, it still wasn’t too hard.

“Diamond”: The final puzzle. This was the one that felt annoying as you received the first few components at the start of the game and can only solve it at the end. We just didn’t know that until the very end. We also didn’t know if we had missed something. So, we just kept on revisiting this puzzle several times during play. Rather annoying I must say.

Overall the puzzles in the game are solid, as I said, but not hard at all. Except for my lone rant about pieces scattered everywhere, Forgotten Island is actually a pretty typical entry into the genre of EXIT series. I enjoyed it for a light-hearted afternoon romp with the family , but nothing spectacular or breath catching stood out from all the puzzles. Then again, almost 10 games into the series, it is perfectly acceptable for this game to be acceptable. I would recommend this for a mid-level experienced gamer. It won’t be as hard of a challenge, but just enough to let you feel satisfied.

Initial impression: Good

Updated rankings:

1. Kidnapped in Fortune City

2. Dead Man in Orient Express

3. Abandoned Cabin

4. The Sinister Mansion

5. The Haunted Roller Coaster

6. The Mysterious Museum

7. The Pharaoh’s Tomb

8. The Forgotten Island

9. The Polar Express

10. The Stormy Flight

11. The Sunken Treasure