{"id":21362,"date":"2021-07-19T00:01:12","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T00:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=21362"},"modified":"2021-06-18T13:00:08","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T13:00:08","slug":"beasts-of-maravilla-island-switch-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/19\/beasts-of-maravilla-island-switch-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Beasts of Maravilla Island (Switch, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Boy do I love me some New Pok\u00e9mon Snap!\u00a0 I even named it my Game of the Year SO FAR recently.\u00a0 It\u2019s just so much fun taking pictures of Pok\u00e9mon.\u00a0 But what if I told you there was another game where you get to take pictures of mythical creatures, but instead of being on-rails, you\u2019re free to move around in 3-D space!\u00a0 Well that\u2019s exactly what you get to do in Beasts of Maravilla Island.\u00a0 In the game you play as Marina, a young woman who was told fantastical stories of a magical island with one of a kind creatures by her grandfather.\u00a0 When her grandfather passes away, she inherits his camera and journal, with his dying wish for her to photograph the creatures on this island to prove to the world that it exists.\u00a0 So now she\u2019s off on an expedition in this 3-D photography game that takes elements from titles like Pok\u00e9mon Snap and the photo mini-games in Beyond Good and Evil.\u00a0 It\u2019s available to play on Nintendo Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.<\/p>\n

In the game you\u2019ll move around Marina in 3-D space.\u00a0 She\u2019ll automatically jump if needed, but you can make her whistle to get animals\u2019 attention, and pull out your journal.\u00a0 Sometimes she can do context sensitive actions like pick up objects and climb vines.\u00a0 When you\u2019re ready to snap a photo of something, just pull out your camera with the L trigger button and snap away.\u00a0 In each area you\u2019ll be tasked to fill certain objectives, but luckily you don\u2019t have to do ALL of them to reach the next area.\u00a0 Which is good because it can be tedious to photograph all the plants, bugs, and other things since many of them look the same.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll explore different areas like treetop jungles, glowing forests, and rocky deserts.\u00a0 In each area, Marina will take a liking to a certain animal, such as the playful bird monkeys or mischievous Otterdiles.\u00a0 So another set of objectives is to photograph four different behaviors of these animals.\u00a0 By reading your grandfather\u2019s journal, you\u2019ll learn clues as to how to activate these behaviors.\u00a0 You might also have to do some light puzzle solving with your camera and other skills to progress.\u00a0 For instance, there are certain flowers that emit light when exposed to it, so you must take a flash picture of these flowers and they\u2019ll shine light on things like beanstalks that grow when shined on, and then you can climb them!<\/p>\n

This game has a lot of neat ideas, but it could\u2019ve really used some spit-shine and polish to really make it great.\u00a0 For instance, it\u2019s kind of hard to read the journal in handheld mode on the Switch.\u00a0 I would\u2019ve really liked to have had a zoom feature for that.\u00a0 Also, sometimes goals and objectives are a little unclear.\u00a0 But usually if you follow your nose you\u2019ll get there eventually.\u00a0 Plus the game is a bit buggy and sometimes I would get stuck jumping on a lily pad or something.\u00a0 Luckily you can save at any time.\u00a0 And normally I don\u2019t complain about the graphics, but here they look like something from the PS2 and N64 era and the framerate is very choppy.\u00a0 And sometimes things can really blend into the background and make it hard to see them.\u00a0 I would\u2019ve like to have had the flowers that shine light stand out more, since it\u2019s always necessary for you to photograph them to proceed.\u00a0 But if you enjoy games like New Pok\u00e9mon Snap and the photography parts of Beyond Good and Evil, then you may want to check this one out anyway.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nothing violent or objectionable here.\u00a0 Reading skill is a must for the text, but there is another skill needed that you may not think about.\u00a0 The journal you use is written entirely in cursive, and since I don\u2019t think they teach kids cursive writing in schools anymore, they may have trouble reading it, too.\u00a0 Granted, this is the neatest and most consistent cursive writing I\u2019ve ever seen, but even I had trouble making some of it out because it was so small in handheld mode.\u00a0 Just makes me wonder if they should still teach cursive in school.\u00a0 Even though it\u2019s not usually necessary to write it anymore, kids may need that skill in the future to read important historical documents like, you know, the Constitution and Bill of Rights.\u00a0 Just something to think about.\u00a0 Beasts of Maravilla Island is rated E for Everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boy do I love me some New Pok\u00e9mon Snap!\u00a0 I even named it my Game of the Year SO FAR recently.\u00a0 It\u2019s just so much fun taking pictures of Pok\u00e9mon.\u00a0 But what if I told you there was another game where you get to take pictures of mythical creatures, but instead of being on-rails, you\u2019re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21362"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21364,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21362\/revisions\/21364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}