The other island (⚙️)

[Jake]

Keeping the title spoiler free,  but this is definitely a spoiler thread. 
 

Has anyone found and visited the other island in the game? Not the tiny one hidden in the crooks of the map that you need to find to complete the game, but the whole secret island sunken beneath the sea?

 

If you get the trivia card about Cogg Island, and see an answer that looks like map coordinates, pick the coordinates and then sail there and dive into the ocean!

 

I haven’t done this yet but watched a YouTube video about it and, immediately switched it off because it looked substantial I want to explore it for myself, but there’s a whole other place hidden inside the game, attached to the trivia card sub-game. 

[GuhGunk]

yeah, i made it there. had to grind to get all the trivia cards first. it's not as substantial as you may be hoping. just 5 areas that are basically sketched out with no interactivity. still super cool to walk around a cut level, though.

[Jake]

Yeah it is definitely cut content! But as a space it looked compelling. Nowhere near as substantial as Melee or Brr Muda, but more substantial than Scurvy. 
 

I would love to know what they’d planned for it and how it was supposed to fit. (And if it was always underwater and the timer played a role there, or if it was only “sunk” when turning it into an Easter egg.)

[KestrelPi]

36 minutes ago, Jake said:

Keeping the title spoiler free,  but this is definitely a spoiler thread. 
 

Has anyone found and visited the other island in the game? Not the tiny one hidden in the crooks of the map that you need to find to complete the game, but the whole secret island sunken beneath the sea?

 

If you get the trivia card about Cogg Island, and see an answer that looks like map coordinates, pick the coordinates and then sail there and dive into the ocean!

 

I haven’t done this yet but watched a YouTube video about it and, immediately switched it off because it looked substantial I want to explore it for myself, but there’s a whole other place hidden inside the game, attached to the trivia card sub-game. 

 

Ah, I knew about the island but now how to find it. Using the actual answer on the trivia card is pretty funny. I think I would have spent a long time looking for clues.

 

I've said elsewhere but there seems to be a lot of this easter-eggy content in this game. Perhaps more than we're used to. I'm still stuck wondering if there are secret uses for those items you pick up in part 1 and never use (I can think of 3 off the top of my head - a sponge, a tangled up piece of string, and a plush dog). Or if there really could be any deeper meaning to all that graffiti or that weird symbol that seems to have appeared on the Melee Island clock.

 

Maybe I'm just hoping for more mysteries to uncover, but ... there is some stuff in there that feels a bit inexplicable right now.

[GuhGunk]

the sign in the middle of the island is a little note from the developers saying it is cut content. it doesn't seem to me to have anything related to being underwater by what we can see of its design, so my guess is it's just for the sake of the easter egg. it does look like it may have had more going on than scurvy or terror potentially.

[Jake]

5 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

a sponge, a tangled up piece of string, and a plush dog

These are all valid mops! The others can be safely thrown in the fire. 

[KestrelPi]

23 minutes ago, Jake said:

These are all valid mops! The others can be safely thrown in the fire. 

 

You know... now you SAY it I remember I did consider that possibility briefly, but I dismissed it, for reasons that I don't know why.

[demone]

Are the trivia cards randomized each playthrough? I actually didn't pay as much attention I should've to them during my initial playthrough.

[Colorfinger]

Just reopened the game and went there myself. You know it's interesting how much the overworld maps kind of look like theme park maps. Cogg island in particular gives me that feeling...

[Jake]

They’re all Wally branded!

 

but yeah Cogg specially looks like a theme park land to me. 

[Remi]

For those who want to give it a read, here are some Cogg Island facts and figures and other spoilers: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/The-Secret-of-Cogg-Island

[Alexandra IDV]

Unfortunate that this one was cut - it's got some very compelling art, and I would've loved to have another island to move back and forth between after getting the ship. Of course it comes across as even more mysterious and interesting than it possibly would have now that we only know it as a what-could-have-been area, but it still looks really neat.

[LuigiHann]

I think it's just my imagination and bias, but it really feels like this could have been an homage or parody of Myst. Forest, ship, mechanical structures, some kind of star chart viewer (as close to a planetarium as you're likely to get in MI) and a grandfather-clock-styled clock tower. If it were just one or two of these things I'd shrug it off but it adds up a bit. 

[Jake]

Honestly, Guybrush wandering around Myst solving really evil mechanical puzzles would be something I would enjoy.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I discovered Cog Island completely through normal play! I was collecting the trivia cards while I considered what to do next, and one came up that was a bit weird: It mentioned an island I know didn't exist, but it also game a map co-ordinate as answer. I decide to try out the map co-ordinate to see if it could exist on the game map... and it could! So I told Guybrush to dive down and lo! An island of cut content, that I wish hadn't been cut!

 

Of course you can't come back up... so you end up dying, which felt weird at the time. But it was fine with the autosave feature.

 

A great easter egg to stumble across!

[KestrelPi]

I'm always sort of wary of peeking behind the curtain too much these days, given the double edged sword that has proven to be. I think the average player doesn't think a lot about content getting cut, and doesn't understand very well that cutting is a big part of the creative process. On the one hand I'm super interested in what the concept behind Cogg might have been and what the puzzles were like and how it fit into the story. On the other, it's hard for me to wish it hadn't been cut because maybe it killed the pacing, or they decided it was just the worst bit of the game, or didn't advance the plot enough, or just didn't fit thematically as well as some other stuff. 'Cut for time' could mean a lot of things.

 

Sometimes I watch deleted scenes out of interest, but I only very rarely wish they hadn't been cut. In a way, I'm happier this easter egg exists than I am sad that Cogg wasn't finished in the end.

[Jake]

49 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

I'm happier this easter egg exists than I am sad that Cogg wasn't finished in the end.

Same. I like seeing an old piece of dev history and I like that they sank it beneath the ocean. It’s a cool Easter egg. I can’t really imagine how it worked into the finished game, though, and don’t really need to. 

[LowLevel]

The interesting part to me is that the island wasn't cut because it didn't work for the game but, according to the sign in the game, because of time issues.

 

I hope that the developers will get a chance to properly add Cogg Island to the game, sooner or later, like Terrible Toybox did with two new rooms in Thimbleweed Park.

 

Said that, the moment I saw that modified clock on Melee Island, in the first video clips, I instantly assumed that it had to do with a puzzle.

 

I wondered how the star and moon elements on the clock face would contribute to the puzzle:

 

 

Well, maybe it's completely a coincidence, but the clock on Cogg Island also has a moon and a star element revolving around it:

 

[Alexandra IDV]

I would love to see it completed and added, but I wonder if they would really have put the hidden noninteractive version of it into the game if they were expecting to be able to add it in full later on. 🤔

[JJ1]

1 hour ago, Alexandra IDV said:

I would love to see it completed and added, but I wonder if they would really have put the hidden noninteractive version of it into the game if they were expecting to be able to add it in full later on. 🤔

I would guess no, but game success sometimes leads developers or publishers to put additional resources toward a released game.  And with 3000+ positive reviews already and a high simultaneous player count of 15000+, the game is clearly very successful.  Those numbers are both a lot higher than many recent adventure games that were written about as being financially successful.

[KestrelPi]

11 hours ago, LowLevel said:

The interesting part to me is that the island wasn't cut because it didn't work for the game but, according to the sign in the game, because of time issues.

 

I hope that the developers will get a chance to properly add Cogg Island to the game, sooner or later, like Terrible Toybox did with two new rooms in Thimbleweed Park.

 

Said that, the moment I saw that modified clock on Melee Island, in the first video clips, I instantly assumed that it had to do with a puzzle.

 

I wondered how the star and moon elements on the clock face would contribute to the puzzle:

 

 

Well, maybe it's completely a coincidence, but the clock on Cogg Island also has a moon and a star element revolving around it:

 

 

I do suspect that the weird stuff on Melee's clock could have related to these puzzles. Maybe some of that graffiti around town, too.

 

But as for 'time issues', worth it to remember that designing more than is effectively possible to produce is an extremely common problem in games and media as a whole. Which is why I describe getting a look at that stuff as a double-edged sword. It's interesting to think of what might have been, but stretching it to start believing that the better version of this game was one where this island was finished, and that the only reason it's not in is logistics. In nearly every game, stuff gets cut... so if this was the biggest chunk to get cut from this game, then it must be because they considered it the least valuable part of the game.

 

[LowLevel]

41 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

In nearly every game, stuff gets cut... so if this was the biggest chunk to get cut from this game, then it must be because they considered it the least valuable part of the game.

 

I agree, but this also applies to content that has been eventually added to games, such as the arcade room in Thimbleweed Park. It made sense to cut it because it was not a key feature and the game works perfectly well without it, but that does not imply that the game was not improved when the room and its associated puzzles were added.

[ThunderPeel2001]

This is one DLC I'd pay for

[IllidanS4]

There is a StarMap0-hd image in the game files. I don't remember seeing this anywhere in the game, but it seems it might match the area at the north:

[cinnamon]

I wonder if the concept art we get during the credits, which is randomized, is available in a higer resolution in the actual game files. I think there's a few images that show cut stuff, related to the island and otherwise.