Success! The good news is that Lost is as good as we could have reasonably expected. Admittedly, our hopes were just a tad lower than shark excrement, but Lost (or rather Lost: Via Domus, to give it its full title – the Latin bit means ‘way home’, as you’ll soon learn) stands proud at the pinnacle of these low expectations but as you’ll eventually discover, if you give this game a few hours, what starts off as an awkward experience will blossom into a passable experience in possession of a modicum of enjoyment.

So why so awkward initially? After crash-landing on the island, you follow linear, insultingly easy tasks, loosely interacting with key members of the doomed Oceanic flight. You are presented with a list of questions to ask them but their responses are spat back with distain – like they simply haven’t got time to fraternise with a fellow islander who, had he been in the TV show, was so far in the fringes that he would surely meet a horrible end. But this being a game, you live the duration of the ordeal. You initially fall into the trap of assuming that you have to carefully choose your questions to glean a response from the character that will provide useful insight, but this is not the case, you get the same questions every time that can be asked in any order, with exactly the same response. It really feels like you are never allowed to bond with any of the islanders because, well, your character just doesn’t exist in the show and so any attempt to integrate yourself into the inner circle is doomed from the start as the whole Lost universe could be plunged into jeopardy. Some people take it very seriously, you know.

So you eventually make your way to the beach crash site and witness the drama unfolding around you as folk lay stricken, plane parts – some highly dangerous – whir and spark on the sand and Jack, the doctor, urgently tends to the victims that are on the brink of checking out. So, what do you do in this situation? You wander around collecting coconuts (see ‘Tropical swapshop’) and asking clearly distressed people really banal questions. To be fair though, you do save the day by solving an electrical circuit board puzzle to divert the fuel away from the burning sections of plane. This early brainteaser involves placing the correct fuse in the correct socket to evenly distribute the electrical current through the board. If you enjoy it then good times, because every puzzle in the game involves doing exactly the same thing.

It is shortly after solving this first puzzle that the game’s first real surprise occurs. The events played out thus far come to a dramatic cliffhanger conclusion, the screen fades to the token ‘boom’ sound and you feel as though you have just sat through an episode of the TV show, albeit one of the not-very-interesting ones when nothing really happens, like the one with Hurley and the camper van. The next episode kicks in immediately and you even get the full “previously on Lost” potted highlights (which unfortunately you can’t skip). Seven of these ‘episodes’ comprise this game and whereas the first one lasts about ten minutes, they do get longer.

So who are you and what the hell are you doing on the island? At the start you, the character, are no more in the know than you, the audience, but key ‘flashback’ sequences massage your character’s grey matter and teases out new nuggets of backstory – the same arduous drip-feeding of information that fans (or perhaps ‘sufferers’ would be a more accurate term) of the show have grown accustomed to. In the first flashback you brandish a camera, so that implies you are a photographer and you must take a specific photograph to ‘remember’ whatever it is you are supposed to remember in this flashback. Early flashbacks are disappointing because you learn that ‘shock!’ Kate was a convict and ‘horror!’ Locke was a cripple. Later in the game, these flashbacks err more towards you and not the other islanders, though, and so eventually you figure out who you are and how you came to be in this undeniably beautiful part of the world.

The look of Lost is misleading at first. From a superficial view the graphics are great, rich in textures and light effects – the way in which the sand on the beach is bleached out when you turn to face the Sun being a particular high-point. But scratch deeper and you’ll be disappointed by the way you can walk into a pair of jeans hanging on a washing line and be stopped as if confronted by hard steel. Many of the locations from the show play out the events of the game, the Swan Hatch, Black Rock, the dense jungle inhabited by the black mist and ‘the others’. The jungle segments are where the tension is heightened due to you having to navigate using compass points or tree markers while listening out for the black mist (loving those musical tempo hikes) and avoiding gunfire from unseen snipers. But sadly even these seem linear with little scope for getting, ahem, lost, due to claustrophobic level confines.

So with apparently so little going for it, Lost just about wins us over with its steady plot curve, atmosphere and knowing nod to fans who can enjoy a few bunk-ups with prior knowledge of the show and its environments that noobs will have to work harder for. A decent enough TV tie-in, but only just.

Ryan Butt