Lost: Via Domus (Makes You Glad Game Rental Companies Exist)

I'm a pretty big Lost fan - over the last few years I've gotten sucked into the whole ridiculous mythos.  The more absurd it becomes the more I love it.  When I heard that they were releasing a videogame based on the show, I knew I was going to have to play it, even if it turned out to be a giant turd.  Luckily it turned out to be pretty decent (but only if you're a Lost fan), but I'm glad that I rented it from Gamefly instead of buying it.

It was like this game was engineered to be a rental and nothing more - it has seven "episodes" that you can complete in 30 - 45 minutes each pretty easily.  The game showed up in my mailbox on Saturday, and I finished it last night after about 3 sessions over the weekend totaling about 5 hours.  The game creates a new character (Elliot) who has a side story of his own that runs parallel with the first two seasons of the show.  His story is pretty good, not quite up to the top tier stories of the main cast, but certainly better than the backstory for Nikki and Paolo in Season 3.

This isn't an action based game (other than a couple chase sequences and a handful of areas where you can use a gun) - it's more like those old point and click PC adventure games (think King's Quest) - you explore the environment, interact with important objects/items, and talk to other characters.  You move around in third person in a 3D environment - the game controls and looks very similar to the present day Desmond portions of Assassin's Creed.  You'll also do some light puzzle solving - there are some puzzles involving reactivating power supplies by manipulating fuses to get the right voltage to the right areas, and some simple IQ test questions involving pattern recognition you'll need to answer to access computer terminals (examples - what comes next in the series "Z-X-C-V-?" and "2-4-8-10-20-22-?").  The puzzles were fun, but hardly challenging or mentally taxing.

In the game, you'll get to explore most of the iconic areas from the show - the wreckage strewn beach; Black Rock; the Hatch; the Swan, the Hydra, and Flame Stations; and if you really keep an eye out, you'll even get to see the Medical Station and Pearl Station.  The coolest thing you'll get to see in the game (and the big draw for me) is what is behind the concrete wall in the Swan creating the magnetic anomaly.   It's not any kind of huge revelation, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.   There's a lot of fan service in the game.

Other than the really short length, I only have a handful of gripes about the game.  First, you explore a couple of dark caves with a torch early in the game that have a number of bottomless pits in them.  Because of the third person perspective, it can be hard to tell these pits from shadows, unless you tilt the camera so you're looking at the ground.  You also have to extinguish your torch to pass through waterfalls, and sometimes there will be a pit nearby that you'll stumble into while it's still dark.  Another annoyance is encountering the Black Smoke in the jungle.  To get from area to area, you follow flag markers in the jungle to get from, say, the beach to Black Rock.  Occasionally, the Black Smoke will come along, and to keep it from attacking you, you'll have to hide in a cylinder-like grouping of trees.  Then when it leaves and you climb out of the trees, the game will often drop you out in a different orientation than you entered in, so you're often left unsure which way to go to continue in the direction you were heading.  Since the jungle is pretty dense and everything looks the same, you really can't get your bearings in any other way than using the flag markers.  It's not a huge deal, it just gets a little frustrating when the Black Smoke shows up every 30 seconds, hiding, the climbing back out and trying to find your bearings again.  Another weird thing is the trading system.  You'll find coconuts, bottled water, and other various objects lying around that you can trade other castaways for stuff like torches.  It works well, it's just weird trading Charlie a papaya, an Apollo bar, and a copy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" for a gun and a clip (why does Charlie have a gun and not Sawyer?).

The graphics are generally pretty nice - the environments look good, the Stations and living quarters all have a lot of detail, but some of the characters are hit-or-miss.  The character models for Michael and Tom especially will creep you the fuck out. Some of the voice actors from the show did their own voice work for the game (Ben, Mikhail, Desmond, Tom, and Claire), but each of those characters only have about three or four lines of dialog and you'll see them maybe once or twice.  Unfortunately, the character that has the most dialog - Locke - probably has the worst stand in.  Sawyer's stand in is also pretty bad - the guy doing his voice work has one the worst southern accents I've ever heard.  Luckily, though, the voice stand ins for Jack, Kate, Sayid, and especially Hurley are usually pretty solid and not distracting.

This game pretty much exists solely as fan service - there should be a sticker on the box that says "For Fans Only!".  If you're a fan of the show, give this game a rent and you'll blow through it in a weekend or a few nights.  But if the phrase "Dude, you got a little Artz on you" has no meaning to you, nothing in this game is going to make any sense to you, and the gameplay really isn't compelling enough to keep you interested if you're really not into the story.  It assumes a great deal of familiarity with the show's plot and character's, and the amount of enjoyment you'll get out of this game is directly correlated with that.  It is good for a quick achievement score boost - you'll get an easy 700 or so just playing through the story.  The rest comes from photographing certain objects that are important to the Lost universe that you may come across while exploring.  Most are of these are easy to find (Kelvin's suit, Desmond's mural), but a few (Hurley's Van, the Pearl Station, and the Medical Station) can be tricky to find unless you know how to uncover them based on your knowledge of the show.