Lost: Via Domus (PS3)
Every now and then, a show comes along that captures the imagination and attention of the T.V.-viewing audience and proceeds to dominate the prime time slot. In the mid-2000s, the ABC drama Lost was on the lips of millions as people tuned in to unravel the mystery of a group of survivors stranded after a plane crash on an island with secrets both mundane and supernatural. Perhaps almost as strange as the situations in the show was the decision to adapt it into a video game in the middle of its six season run not as an adventure game like other dramas have managed to find footing in, but as an action-adventure game based on a wholly original character.
Lost: Via Domus is the story not of the main cast of Lost, but of an entirely new survivor of the crash of Flight 815 who finds he has amnesia when he comes to on the island the plane crashes on. Immediately, you have the very simple goals of wanting to remember who you are and trying to be rescued from this seemingly uninhabited isle, but very quickly it becomes clear your own history and the happenings on the island are much stranger than you could have expected. On the one hand, the mystery concocted for your character is a fairly strong driving force that unravels gradually over the course of the game, the player drip fed information through flashback sequences to gradually paint a picture of the past and learn how it still affects the player character even now on this strange island. Had it just been this initially nameless man’s tale, it could survive well enough, but this is a game based on the Lost T.V. show, so it’s packed with appearances from the show’s characters, your personal journey running parallel to the events of Lost’s first three seasons.
Unfortunately for Lost fans and newcomers alike, the way the show’s cast and events is integrated is sloppy and sometimes confusing. At first, it’s definitely intriguing to meet the cast of varied characters, the group having some good diversity like a convict, a pregnant woman, a couple that seems to only speak Korean, and so on. There are clearly characters here who would have a good dynamic if they ever talked to each other, but that only ever takes place on the T.V. series. Here, you only really learn what is going on with these other characters when they intersect with your story, and sometimes, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on with the other survivors at all even if you have the outside context. On the day of the crash Michael is searching for his son Walt but he is never seen again after and that element is dropped, one day Sawyer and a few others are just off the island on a raft they were apparently working on, Charlie the former band member just appears on the island one day while the likes of Claire are just gone all of a sudden, and perhaps the strangest part is when the lady who only spoke Korean before just starts speaking English to you. You are basically asked to accept that you aren’t being told anything about the activities of other survivors and must focus on your own story, meaning that ultimately your interactions with them are mostly superfluous, Jack and Locke being some of the few major characters who actually contribute consistently to your journey of self-discovery.
Luckily, the personal mystery does get the most focus, especially thanks to the flashback sequences that aren’t just cutscenes. When something sparks a memory in our amnesiac protagonist, you have a shattered image of an event from your past that you must find and properly capture with your camera in a dream-like state. Each chapter in the game slowly reveals more about what you were doing before taking the fateful flight, Lost: Via Domus building a mystery with enough pieces to figure out the direction its going but the specifics solidifying as you near the climax, all while Locke asks if you’re the man whose past you’re learning about is still the man you are today. Even though Lost’s island has unusual happenings on it, your personal tale is grounded and understandable, and while the unraveling is more interesting than the end product, it could have almost served as a satisfying backbone for the experience save the game feeling compelled to throw in an ending just to ensure that it has some tinge of Lost’s typical speculation baiting. The showrunners have disavowed the game, stating it’s not canon, so you’re essentially denied any real closure because of the decision to sacrifice a neat and tidy conclusion for something unusual.
Constructing flashbacks is perhaps the game’s most unique gameplay moment, uniting the story focus of the game with an interactive challenge, but most of the game is spent walking around interacting with things and people. The game is very proud to whip out a barter system where things you find on the island can be traded with other survivors depending on their worth, but it’s incredibly shallow and slowly loses its sting. The only things really worth buying are torches for dark areas and a gun and ammo that you could almost go the whole game without using. If you scavenge enough early on you can snag the items you need when needed and then your inventory just gets cluttered with items you no longer have any use for. The game clearly thinks barter is going to have some legs, since right up until the end areas are littered with objects to scoop up that only serve the purpose of trading. Once barter has dried up, most of the conversations with people that don’t tie to the plot are going to be that specific character giving their spin on pointing you off to doing the thing you know you have to do, so interacting with the islanders loses its appeal fairly quickly as well.
Exploration is what you’ll mostly be up to when you’re walking about, and the tasks here are hit and miss. Lost: Via Domus is best when it’s giving you puzzles to solve, most of them being fuse puzzles where you need to control the voltage on a circuit panel by swapping fuses around and knowing when to dump charge to hit the required amounts. Legitimately puzzling and having a consistently rising difficulty curve over the course of the game, I could almost see the fuse puzzles split off into its own puzzle game provided it kept advancing and introducing more mechanics after it worked through what this game has to offer. There are also, oddly enough, occasional IQ quizzes, mostly pattern recognition tests that are decent brainteasers as well. Exploring the smaller areas for points of interest also carries the proper weight and air of mystery, the player coming across more and more unusual places on their journey that will put them on edge. There are segments where you need to walk through dark areas using torches or a lantern, but outside of bumbling about lost, your challenge here is just not to run out of resources before you find where you need to be.
The true navigational challenges come in the moments of traversing the jungle, where the player has to find landmarks that point them in the direction they need to go while under assault from one of two threats. The more tame threat would be the Others, humans on the island not associated with the survivors of Flight 815 who will try to hunt you down while you’re finding your way through the foliage. Technically, here is where you can use your gun outside of the scripted moments, but the Others are barely a threat, the player able to shake them fairly easy and their shots being sloppy even if they spot you. Their shots might not even kill you if they hit, and as long as they don’t hit you twice, you can sometimes heal off the first shot just by waiting a bit. The Smoke Monster sections are the more threatening ones, a black cloud-like being moving through the trees and able to kill you in an instant if it touches you. At first, the way you deal with it is incredibly dull. There are clusters of banyan trees you can hide in until the Smoke Monster passes, but the way it happens each time is incredibly slow. First, the game plays an unskippable cutscene of the monster circling around the banyans, aware you’re in there but unable to get to you. After that, it turns back to controllable gameplay, but the monster will still loop around the banyans a few times before taking off. You can usually expect a few unavoidable moments of hiding to survive these segments, meaning this slow process loses its luster despite the Smoke Monster otherwise being sold as a legitimately terrifying threat… although perhaps part of the fear comes from knowing that if you die, you have to play that segment again.
The last Smoke Monster segments are also tied to the last gameplay style, that being a running segment where you die if you can’t keep up the pace. These are simple running challenges where you need to jump over obstacles and dive beneath others, and while they seem odd compared to the more reserved style of the rest of the game’s action, they aren’t actually bad save that a loss usually comes with having to watch an unskippable opening cutscene before you can try the segment again. They are basic, but much like the flashback sequences and fuse puzzles, they break up the moments between narrative progression and they mean that the awful forest sneaking sections can’t fill too much of the game time.
THE VERDICT: Lost: Via Domus is itself a little lost in trying to figure out what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t explain certain things for Lost newcomers and the T.V. show tie-ins aren’t really fleshed out save the big things and the characters it has to have. However, the original narrative it creates is well-paced to string the mystery along and keep your interest despite the unintentional confusion of the T.V. show going on in the background of this personal tale. The gameplay is where the story support begins to fail, because while it does have some flashback segments that mix interactivity and plot well, the few good moments outside of that are the rare fuse puzzles and IQ tests. Mostly, it’s tedious sneaking where the threat is nearly nonexistent or slows things down for it being too devastating, and the barter system that tries to make exploration more interesting dries up almost as quickly as the chances of a Lost cast member saying anything interesting to you if they’re not currently the plot hook. Lost: Via Domus is a story that takes place beside Lost rather than truly in it, and that hampers the experience more than it helps.
And so, I give Lost: Via Domus for the PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. Good storytelling and mostly bad play is probably what you would expect from a game based on a T.V. drama. The reason you want to keep playing is the mystery of the main character and the game spaces out revelations properly, every chapter sure to end with some sort of hook to make you play the next one to figure out what is going on. The original story struggles to rope in Lost elements though, perhaps benefiting those unacquainted with the show and underwhelming those hoping for something that would help them better understand the strange mysteries surrounding the island. If the plot doesn’t grab you, the game would be much weaker, as this is certainly not a game to play for the actual game mechanics. Most of its problems gameplaywise are just about not having the meat to be interesting enough on their own, with most being a bit bland or basic in retrospect. The Smoke Monster stealth sections are the low and the puzzles are the gameplay high, but when the whole is considered in service of the narrative, it’s a bit too weak.
Lost: Via Domus doesn’t feel like the right way to adapt a drama steeped in sci-fi and supernatural mysteries, but it could have gone much worse. For those interested, they can make their way to the end of the story, it just won’t be the best ride due to its hodgepodge design.