Review The Lost Island of Alanna Developer: The Coca Cola Company Publisher: The Coca Cola Company Genre: Adventure Release Date: 1998 Platform: Review by Jennifer Miller September 9, 2005		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

I recently moved and this of course drove me to dive into my vast game collection and weed out the bad apples. This unearthed long lost loves and general oddities, collections of characters suited for the Adventure Game sideshow. The game I shall be reviewing today is most definitely the bearded lady of them all.

The Lost Island of Alanna was released in 1998, amid the fervor that was the Myst-clone years. (It’s a dirty term, but true.) Designed as a promotion for Cherry Coke, Coca-Cola decided it would be cool to make a Myst-like game that would involve their customers to drink Cherry Coke and check out the Cherry Coke website to get clues in order to proceed. They had even set up a chat room and published clues in magazines to aid their explorers in their quest to discover just what exactly was on the island of Alanna . . . and how the heck did Cherry Coke fit into all of this?

Drink it and they will come

So, with a glass of Cherry Coke next to my trusty notebook, I began to search this lost island. I figured that Cherry Coke would aid my search, provide me with some special ability that would enable me to see beyond the circa 1998 flat graphics and unlabeled inventory items. Would it open my ears to the sounds that weren’t there? And suddenly make those journal entries appear that I would need in order to solve the first puzzle? Nope . . . all I did was spill it, make my desk sticky and find that post-it note that I written down a walkthrough for the game on. So I guess it made me do something . . . Windex my desk at any point.

Unfortunately, for those just picking up Alanna now, you won’t get very far without the journals that were previously published on the Cherry Coke website. Thanks to the good folks at Balmoral Software, you can find a walkthrough for the game that will provide you with the information needed from the journals, but that might ruin it for those who hate turning to such things.

Puzzles are the standard, giving us the usual cast of characters: inventory, codes, sound matching, and of course, the dreaded slider puzzle. The accompanying sound effects, the little that there are, are annoying and at times even grating. The slider especially has this stone-grinding sample that makes me want to tear my hair out.

Inventory puzzles involve the combination of items, and this isn’t quite as intuitive as you might think. In fact, the gent that I originally purchased this game from attached a sticky that reads: “to combine objects, hold shift key and click another item.” This is because, well, there isn’t really a manual or Readme with the game. As for the controls, there are standard for the first two Journeyman games. Game play takes place in a square on the top half of the screen, while four arrows in the bottom right hand corner control the movement. One welcome bit were the comments at the top of screen. While normally these say things like “this is a rock” and “you can’t go that way,” sometimes our unknown omniscient narrator provides with witty commentary. “Are you trying to start a rock collection?” Or when I was blatantly misusing inventory items “whip the thicket.”

But in the end, I felt like Ralphie from A Christmas Story when he gets the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, and all he gets for his trouble is an advertisement for Ovaltine. The game is extremely short and not really satisfying. In the end, we are enlightened with how to read fortunes found on the Cherry Coke labels. Stop the presses!

What makes The Lost Island of Alanna really important though is that at one point in popular culture, large companies felt that Adventure games were the ticket to advertising their product. They had faith in the size of the audience to get their message across. Nowadays, this game stands as a piece of nostalgia, kitschy amongst its older brothers like Amber and Riven. Kitschy like a slap bracelet and jelly shoes.

So what’s next? Will Dreamfall have strategically placed advertisements for Big Macs and Starbucks? It may not distract you for long, but it might just save you money on your car insurance.

If you’d like to get your own copy of The Lost Island of Alanna to add to your own Video Game sideshow, may I recommend Gametz.com.

Final Grade: C
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