Lost: Via Domus
I was at Target the other day looking at PC games when a clearance sign caught my eye. Lost: Via Domus was one of the marked down titles. I remembered that the game got fairly terrible reviews, certainly not worth fifty dollars when it came out. But for today, the game was a mere five dollars. Keep in mind that Lost: Via Domus came out February of this year, as a tie in to the premiere of season 4 of the show. What kind of shovelware TV tie-in gets marked down to 10% of its price within less than a year? I decided to find out (it was only five dollars, right?).
After playing the game, I can say it is very much a case of getting both what you expect and what you paid.
You play as an amnesic photojournalist who is being hunted by an assassin. It seems you took a few incriminating photos prior to crashing on the island that someone doesn’t want published. Your quest is to piece together your past so you know why you are being stalked, and to explain the ghost of a woman that is following you as well.
The setup is fairly good - uniquely suited to a Lost game, given the flashback structure the show and game both use - but execution falls down in so many aspects. Perhaps the most obvious is gameplay - Lost: Via Domus is an adventure game. Or rather, it is a poor adventure game. Most of the game consists of walking from point A to B, picking up objects and trading them, fixing electrical panels and passing intelligence tests. Most of the items you pick up are useless except to trade for more slightly less useless items. You must purchase a gun at one point - you may buy extra ammo, but you won’t need to shoot it more than three times during the whole game.
The other significant component to a typical adventure game is speaking with other characters. This is an utter failure in Lost for several reasons. First and foremost, the script is awful. Characters randomly spout lines from the show, as if the player is supposed to gleefully cheer and think “I remember that line!” Such lines will merely confuse players not familiar with the show and feel like patronizing fanservice (if it can be even called that) to hardcore fans.
For instance, early on John Locke randomly tells the player “I don’t want to leave this island.” No context is given as to why he would not want to leave the island - and you are given no option to ask him why. So if you have never watched the show, almost nothing anyone says will make sense. If you have watched the show, there is no point in talking to anyone, except to trigger events to move the game along. The lack of even basic conversation branching makes talking to anyone boring and tedious.
Then there are the graphics. By trying to replicate the actors on the show, the game sits well within the uncanny valley. All of the characters - except the ones created specifically for the game - look like horrific living-dead versions of themselves. Marvel at zombie Hurley, who looks like a fat little midget who has gorged himself on ten too many brains! And there’s zombie Ben, who… actually, Ben looks more or less accurate, thanks to how wonderfully creepy Michael Emerson looks.
The voice acting doesn’t help with the uncanny valley effect. Very few actors from the show reprise their role, and as such very few of the characters sound correct. As an added bonus, the acting itself is horrible and shows very little direction.
In fact, the less the actual Lost characters are involved, the better the game feels. Some of the later flashbacks within the game are pretty well put together. But when the main characters get involved, things tend to fall apart. It does not help that the beach is typically populated with a maximum of five main characters at once. There were 48 survivors of Oceanic 815 - where are they? A much better game would have focused on characters we haven’t seen (such as the main character of the game) with sparse interactions with the “A-team” as Charlie puts it in the game.
I do have to give the game credit in a few places. The music seems to be variations on the themes from the show, without reproducing them verbatim ad-nauseum. The direction style of the cut scenes (voice acting excluded) is quite interesting and in the same vein as the show. Breaking up the game into episodes works quite well. And there is also a very handy “Previously on Lost” feature that recaps previous episodes for you. Unfortunately, these are played at the beginning of each episode even if you just beat the previous episode, not just when loading the game. They are also unskippable, which becomes a pain when you die and have to sit through it all over again.
A good Lost adventure game is possible. This simply is not it. Not recommended, even for five dollars.