I’m a huge fan of Lost! I love it and can’t get enough. It is a show I’ve never found fault in, as I’m one of those people who don’t mind the constant questions with little advancement in the way of answers, and will quickly defend my show should someone ever question its quality. Lost is the best show on television – period. It’s only natural that I would be so stoked to finally play a Lost game, being able to live the island life myself and see all the show’s locations and meet up with the inhabitants that I love watching every week. So as you can see, when it comes to Lost, I’ll readily admit that I’m a fanboy, so when I tell you that Lost: Via Domus is a game you should avoid then you know it has to have been really bad. So just how bad is Lost: Via Domus? Well, to put it in Lost terms, I’d give it the ranking of a Niki or Paulo (aka good for about one episode and that’s it).

THE STORY SO FAR
If you need to know the story of Lost then you’re missing out on the best show on television, but we’ll humor you just the same. Lost tells the story of the survivors of Oceanic flight 815, a plane that was leaving Sydney, Australia when all of a sudden the plane broke apart and a select number of survivors found themselves alive on an island where weird things were happening, people called Others threatened our survivors, and where a rumble in the jungle turned out to be a creature lovingly referred to as “the smoke monster” by all the show’s fans. Whenever the show isn’t dealing with the present, however, we’re often going back in time to experience the flashbacks of our main cast as we see the events that shaped the current lives of the island inhabitants.

Lost: Via Domus is a completely new story featuring a completely new character, which may or may not fall into the canon of the series (it really depends on how you choose to view the game). You play as one of the survivors, though after the crash you wake up not knowing who you are, but slowly you’ll start to uncover your past, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way off the island. The game follows the first two seasons for the most part, but that’s where the canon and mythology comes into play, as there are some events that don’t either happen in the right order or completely go against what we’ve seen in the show. For instance, Locke once was in a wheelchair, and in the series we see the wheelchair actually being burned, but in Lost you’ll see the wheelchair just thrown into the jungle. It’s tough to talk too much about the story, as spoilers would ruin one of the interesting things about the game, and much like Lost itself, the game features just as many questions as it does answers. To put it simply, only fans will take something away from the story, and even then it might not be much (or even amount to much if it isn’t series canon).

GAMEPLAY
Lost: Via Domus plays like a point-and-click adventure game along the lines of Syberia more so than the old Myst games, meaning that you’ll actually move around and interact with objects and people instead of just clicking on a bunch of static images. The thing about Lost: Via Domus is that in terms of point-and-click adventure games, Lost plays like one that was created for noobs and which features no interesting puzzles to tease your brain (there are basically three different ones and that’s it).

The main goal of the game is to experience the story, which considering the source material is probably the best thing, though it would’ve been amazing to have a vast, open-ended world where you’re able to explore the island at your own leisure and discover things; instead, you’ll have your hand held from beginning to end, only being able to access the areas needed to advance the story, and only getting the items that will help you proceed.

The first type of puzzle you’ll come across is the fuse box puzzle, which repeats often and too frequently for its own good. The gist of the fuse puzzle is that there are usually a series of switches that need so much power to turn green, and then once they are all green you’ll either turn off something, turn on something, or be given access to something. The challenge of the fuse puzzles is that you have three different types of connector pieces, each diminishing so much power along the line every time you use one. For instance, you always start at the source with 100 power, but if you placed a cross-section piece right after that, suddenly you’ve subtracted 15 volts (the challenge comes in figuring out the proper placement of the pieces so each gauge gets as much juice as it needs and not a drop less or more).

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