Maupiti Island

Maupiti Island, released in 1990, is the high point of French studio Lankhor's detective line and a direct sequel to the celebrated Mortville Manor. In 1954, private eye Jérôme Lange is forced by a storm to drop anchor at a tiny Polynesian island, where its lone guesthouse hands him a case straight out of a noir novel: young Marie has vanished, and virtually everyone left on the island has something to hide.

It plays quite unlike the Sierra adventures of its day. You roam the island freely from a first-person view, gather physical clues and, above all, interrogate any suspect about any topic you care to type in. The clock keeps ticking while the characters move around and pursue their own agendas, so when you ask matters as much as what you ask. For 1990 it was a remarkably open-ended piece of interactive detective fiction.

In France the game is a legend: it won the Tilt d'Or award for best adventure game of 1990, sold tens of thousands of copies across Europe and remains a nostalgic touchstone for French adventure fans, helped by the digitised speech that had already made Lankhor famous on the Amiga and Atari ST. You can play the DOS version right in your browser here on OldGame.cz.