Beasts of Maravilla Island is like Pokémon Snap with banana birds and otter crocodiles, and it's out now

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These weird creatures aren't gonna photograph themselves.

Nintendo will never bring Pokémon Snap to PC, but bless indie developers for being there to give us something that captures the same feel. Stardew Valley and Wargroove did the same with other Nintendo classics missing on PC to great success, and indie game Beasts of Maravilla Island looks like a treat: it's an adventure game about exploring a strange and photographing its wildlife. It stood out to me on Saturday's Wholesome Games Direct, and what do you know: it's actually out on Steam right now.

Game director Michelle Olson described Maravilla Island as "a game about discovering extraordinary creatures, learning their behaviors, and most importantly, photographing them." But there's a bit more to it than some other photography games: you'll be solving puzzles as you go and climbing around the environment to find some well-hidden creatures.

Also, there are birds that disguise themselves as bananas. That's a quality critter.

A few more features, courtesy of the Steam page:

  • Includes over 50 extraordinary creatures and plants to photograph, each with their own appearance and behavior such as the Sparkling Lamp lily, the Maravillan Mango Kakapo and the Prism-Winged Butterfly.
  • Complete puzzles that rely on your cooperation with animals, including playing hide and seek with an Otter Crocodile or helping a Bird Monkey find his perfect match.
  • Explore three distinctive ecological zones, the Singing Jungle, the Glimmering River, and the Painted Plateau- each containing their own unique flora and fauna to uncover.

To catch the rest of E3, check out our full E3 2021 schedule.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).