You know a demo is good when finishing it causes you to yell, "No!" in tones that would do a 2-year old proud. Such was my hold-my-breath-til-I-turn-blue reaction at the end of Return to Mysterious Island's tiny morsel of a preview. I wanted more, damit, and right then and now. All the foot stamping in the world won't make the release day get here any faster, though, so I'll have to settle for being impatient and marking my calendar.

As a rule, adventure games are a dime a dozen. Developers slap some really pretty pictures together, throw in a few bizarre puzzles and call it day. They're the sort of games you kind of hate to admit you like, because the vast majority of them simply suck. From what I've seen so far, Return to Mysterious Island is shaping up to be a title you can not only proudly admit to playing, but one you can also feel confident about pimping to your FPS-obsessed friends, too.

You play the game as Mina, a young girl who's really enjoying her solo round-the-world sailing trip right up until her boat is trashed in a storm and she winds up shipwrecked and hungry on a lonely stretch of beach. Her suspicion that she's being watched is quickly confirmed, but once spotted, the voyeur slips away into the jungle. Too weak to follow, Mina puts her mind to filling her grumbling belly and getting her strength back, and so unfolds the action of the demo.

Mina's immediate surroundings are pretty much what you'd expect from the beach of a semi-deserted island. She finds coconuts, crabs, gulls, seaweed, oysters, rocks, and so forth. She also finds a few more mysterious items, such as a nameplate that says "Nautilus," and strange mechanical objects fastened into the rock. Such exploration and item collection is really nothing new, but what sets Return to Mysterious Island apart from the hordes of so-so adventure titles is the logical way Mina interacts with the objects she finds. Sure, she's found all sorts of things she can eat, but she can't eat the oysters until she figures out how to crack them open, and she can't eat the crabs until she cooks them. In other words, the puzzles actually make perfect, logical, everyday sense. How incredibly refreshing.

In another common sensical, yet fairly unusual twist, Mina can combine items she finds to make new objects. Once she discovers a tasty-looking fish swimming in a nearby pool, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the forked branch, long vine, and worms in her inventory will combine to make a pretty fair fishing rod. Sometimes more than one item can perform the same task, though, so it's up to you to figure out which one to use. For example, Mina can use her chunk of sandstone to sharpen a rusty piece of metal into a knife, but then she won't be able to use the metal with the flint to make a primitive lighter. (Here's a tip, sharpen the nameplate instead.) Fortunately, if you change your mind, you can dismantle whatever you've assembled. The interface for combining found objects is both simple and helpful; items move from their slots in the inventory down to an equation along the lines of "stick + vine + ? + worms = ?, letting you see just how many more items are needed before a final product is produced (in this case, one item is left, the hook). What exactly that final product is remains a mystery until all of the required objects are added to the equation.

Although the demo doesn't stray too far from the beach, the attention to detail in the environments has me dying to play the rest of the game. From the flapping of the gulls as they settle on their nests to the flotsam and jetsam washed up against the rocks, the locations all felt like genuine places. I could practically feel the sea foam on my face as Mina strolled from one end of the beach to the other. The scenery isn't made up of static pieces of art, the way the environments in adventure games usually are, they're made of living, breathing landscapes.

The sweet graphics and clever puzzles of Mysterious Island are exactly what fans of the genre have been craving. We'll have to wait until winter to see if The Adventure Company follows through with Return to Mysterious Island''s big promise.