The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary was a game that I remember playing in elementary school. We would go out onto the island and try to do Dr. Quandary’s wishes and the game never seemed to end. Some of the things were quite challenging such as constructing the puzzles. Some people just have a great ability to do them, while I always sat there the whole time trying to figure out how I did this puzzle before and everyone was telling me what to do.
You start out in this carnival and you pick the troll like creature that you want to be after you accomplish the Troggle Shoot. I always found this to be quite fun as you shot the targets as they scrolled past you. After you chose the doll, you are magically transported to his island where you receive a letter in a bottle that tells you what to do. However, to escape that body, you have to try to solve all of Dr. Quandary’s riddles. There is one part where you construct puzzles. Another part where you try and squirt paint into jars that they want. Many of the tasks are logic based and some require math. However, there are some traditional puzzles
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as well such as crosswords. You have to accomplish many of the tasks in order to go from one place to another, because Dr. Quandary wants to make it very difficult for you to move around and get out of your doll body. There is one task, where there are many CD’s lying in the sand, and your job is to take them so that the person you are competing against has to take the last one. It can be difficult sometimes. There is also a person who collects a tax when you try to pass him.
This game was put out by MECC in 1993 as a DOS based program. MECC also put out the
Oregon Trail Game, so you may be able to make some comparisons with the educational value of it. It is a fun but challenging game for an elementary student, but it is great at getting the mind to think logically. I would recommend it to anyone who would just like to test their brain abilities and see how quickly they can come up with solutions to things and think in an abstract way. Be prepared to do some math as well because some of the puzzles require that you know some math in order to solve them.
