The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Ghost Ship

The Good
I recently completed The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Gates of Fate, which I enjoyed, this game uses the same format but has fewer cut scenes and different characters.

The game has the same mix of hidden object, or hidden object shards if we're being picky, and point and click style puzzles as the Gates of Fate and in my opinion having fewer cut scenes improves the flow of the game. The puzzles are varied and occasionally a little forced but they are always logical - they did not do things in the order that I wanted to do them but in the end I could see why.
The story is pure nonsensical fluff about a wrecked ship, helping ghosts find peace, and using alien/ Atlantean technology - it was never made clear which - to prevent a disaster being triggered by a solar eclipse. One of the things that surprised me was the scale of the game, it felt really big. The in-game map is split into four sections, each with fifteen plus locations, and many locations are visited multiple times. Then, when I thought I was close to the end, another chapter with new locations opened up.
As the story is linked to a solar eclipse and there is an in-game timer that pops up every so often warning that the eclipse is due and there's not much time to save the world. Fortunately this timer bears no relation to real time at all so, while it adds to the gaming experience it's still OK to take a comfort break in the last thirty minutes.
There are a couple of underwater sequences and, thankfully, the game does NOT use one of those 'running out of air' timers which I find really irritating.

The game can be played in both windowed and full screen modes with a selection of screen resolutions available in each. It did look sharper when running in a small window but I found playing full screen suited me better. The artwork is good and the placing of the items is clever and I had to use the 'Hint' feature several times.

There is no voice acting in this game and I did not miss it. The text is in English and it is good English, probably better than mine, and I don't remember any spelling, grammatical or glaring misuse of words in the whole game. A couple of the puzzles are sound based, playing a sequence of notes to crack an acoustic lock and using a stethoscope to open a safe. None of these requires the player to actually listen to anything, I didn't, as there visual clues are available for each.

The Bad
This game does not do anything radically new but it does what it does very well.

The Bottom Line
I started playing this game at around six o' clock and I finished around half past midnight so there's a good six to seven hours of gameplay here, more if you play on expert mode and don't use the hint button to find that last hidden item.
I enjoyed this game and recommend it, lots of things to do and not much filler.