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Review by Meg

Wonderland Adventures: Mysteries of Fire Island from Midnight Synergy is the sequel to 2007’s Wonderland Adventures. The game opens in Wonderland, a town of happy-skippy smiley faces with feet. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood when flaming meteors fall from the sky!

Gameplay: Fire Island’s flimsy storyline, a collection of vanilla find-the-artifact missions, is disappointingly linear. The dialogue is little more than clicking ok after each piece of information. Sometimes personality-challenged NPCs block your path to enforce this dialogue. This clumsy plot is used to drive your character along between intriguing puzzles. In each level, your Stinker must solve puzzles to make his way to the goal item. You’ll help your Stinker cross water, avoid falling, use magical mechanisms or otherwise safely make his journey. You might need to create a path of mechanical transporters, herd adorable dragonturtles into water to make a bridge, or time your travels around firetraps.

Each level requires a different kind of creative problem solving, but all involve sweet graphics and clever solutions. With these fantastically engaging logic puzzles, I didn’t much care that my goal was trying to reach a star key, a gold star, a rainbow key, or whatever random object had been introduced for the sole purpose of being that level’s goal.

Because the game auto-saves at the beginning of each adventure, screw-ups aren’t as punishing as they could be. One-solution problems can become frustrating, but if you are fond of the wolf, chicken and grain sack type of logic puzzles, you’ll enjoy these. There is enough variation to make the addictive puzzle-solving worth clicking through the plot.

As you solve puzzles and explore new areas, there are optional gems and coins to pick up for extra points. I’m not really a high score-driven player, personally, so I didn’t spend much time collecting the gems when it wasn’t necessary to solve a level. For in-game shopping, collect gold coins and spend them on equipment. When playing, I had one odd issue. Every time I went from one area to the next, my Stinker always seemed to be facing the wrong way. Maybe it’s just me, and I just always wanted to head the wrong way?

Graphics: The bright Crayola-colored world was cheery, with stylized cartoon-ish terrain and magical effects. Exploring new areas was always fun, sweet and colorful without crossing the line into cutesy.mThe game includes scritters, dragonturtles, fire-breathing flowers, and other wild Wonderland life, but the Stinkers themselves are a bit flavorless. You play as a smiley face with feet and a tam-o’-shanter. It would have been nice to be able to zoom out and see a bit more of the area.

Sound/Music: The background music is just as cheery as the rest of the game, a perfect accompaniment to a sweet game. I had to turn it off after a while, because it became repetitive as I tried and re-tried the puzzles.

Lasting Appeal: There are so many puzzles, and each one stands alone, so Fire Island will stay playable for a long time. This is a long-lasting game for short, coffee-break puzzle solving, or an addictive puzzler for long bursts. I can’t imagine wanting to replay any completed levels later, though. The frustration of getting stuck on a level I’d already beaten would be too much for me.