Lost: The Video Game

Written by Tom Clare in PS3 Game Reviews, Wednesday 2 September, 2009

Released: 2008
Developer: Ubi-Soft Montreal
Publisher: Ubi-Soft
Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: PS3
Version: 1.00

We all know by now that the majority of film-to-game adaptations don’t tend to push the medium all that close to its limits, but an increasing trend of late has been for developers to have their turn with TV series adaptations. I knew little of Lost having never succumbed to watching it, which gave me the rare opportunity to dive into the game with a clean slate and no prior baggage. Who knows, maybe the opportunity to play such a game without fretting over continuity and faithfulness to the source material would make for a refreshing change?

But no, in the real world (or at least, the real gaming-world) stuff like that doesn’t happen all that often and predictably enough, Lost: The Video Game is, to be blunt, rubbish. Regardless of whether you’re a die-hard fan or like me, just after a good slice of adventuring, it comes up way short of the mark. Most tie-ins at least present a few novel gimmicks that in some way link with the original material, but Lost: The Video Game seems to run its creativity dry (if indeed it even had any to begin with) almost instantaneously, with the sum of its parts amounting to a succession of lacklustre mini-games, dull trawls and a near-pathological obsession with fuse-wiring puzzles.

You play as Elliot Maslow, a photographer/journalist who, following a plane crash, is marooned on an island along with the cast of the TV series. He is tasked with regaining his lost memory and then escaping the increasingly hostile jungle surroundings. It’s tempting to label Lost as a poor-mans Uncharted, but in truth it offers so little in the way of gameplay content that the two are barely comparable. It’s quite literally an action game without any action, as you mope around tunnels and caves with the greatest threat coming from your own poor navigation or having your light source run out. One of the strangest paradoxes however concerns the games shooting element, or apparent lack off. Elliot can trade items for a gun (or is eventually given one) which, despite the abundance of ammunition available, goes virtually unused – I only shot three people in the entire game.

The main pull for those who enjoy the TV series will be the beach – site of the plane wreckage and a meeting ground of sorts where you can pick the brains of the various recognisable characters. Sadly though, their inclusion feels like a bit of an after thought. Playing as a character who can’t remember his own identity, it soon becomes clear that nobody else on the island remembers you either, much less care about your plight. The entire cast seems performs with an air of indifference, like it’s just another payday, though in their defence, the ponderous dialogue is lamentable at times. It’s very, very difficult to empathise with characters who continually insist on answering all of your questions either with a sarcastic remark, a flat one-liner or (most annoying of all) a random, deflecting question of their own.

Outside of your base camp things aren’t much better. The opening challenge doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence; like much of what follows, it’s a mini-game of sorts where you are given the apparently simple task of following a dog through the jungle to a clearing. It’s a woeful introduction that accurately encapsulates many of the games frailties as well as highlighting its frankly embarrassing lack of ambition. The camera is dodgy; the controls are cumbersome and the prompt to look where the dog was headed is pointless as by the time the perspective has shifted around, the canine is already out of sight, meaning you essentially have to guess your way through the last few paths.

The rest of the game consists of following forest markers, doing random (even by this games standards) IQ tests on ancient computers and finding fuses with which to complete the painfully dull circuit-board puzzles, of which at one stage you are given three consecutively, a task that will surely sap your will to live. The game reaches its climax with a chase through the jungle, where you are given prompts to jump over or slide under debris. It’s so simple it makes the old madcap into-the-screen chases of Crash Bandicoot seem like rocket science, but this very most basic of sections is one of the more enjoyable as there’s little that could go wrong.

There are at least a couple of areas where Lost: The Video Game shows glimpses of quality. The locations, particularly the various interiors and the crash site, are detailed and vibrant, whilst the waterfall area and giant derelict ship are fairly eye-catching too, even if some of the jungle settings have odd colour schemes that are so muted they border on a greyscale effect. Character animation lets the side down somewhat, with recognisable though unflattering recreations of the shows actors all equipped with the same vacuous, plasticky expressions and their own strange twitch – usually of the lips or eyebrows – that repeats every time you speak to them.

Lost’s sole spark of invention gameplay-wise involves Elliot’s camera. Taking snapshots of certain items encountered during the course of the game will reward you with gallery content, but it’s the flashback scenes that are, by some considerable margin, the most accomplished sections the game has to offer. At set points, you are placed in an short, looping event within Elliot’s memory and your task, using the zoom and focus functions, is to capture the significant moment (such as a briefcase changing hands) in order to ‘unlock’ more of his memory and back story. The flashbacks are neither long nor difficult, but they highlight how good a tool the camera might have been if put to more productive use in the main adventure.

The story is perhaps the single saving grace of what is a very short game, as the initially dull premise does admittedly develop a bit in the later stages and the ending is pretty cool. However, from start to finish Lost: The Video Game is very much a franchise product that seems to have had its marketing potential and storyline sized-up long before the ‘video game’ ideas were ever devised. As such, it feels like a long episode with the playable bits serving as nothing more than half-hearted distractions, meaning it’s difficult to recommend to even the most committed followers.

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