5.0 hours played
Written 28 days ago
[h1][b] TLDR: Immensely creative, aesthetically astounding, and graphically gorgeous. While good, I was let down by frustrating puzzles and an incoherent narrative. [/b] [/h1]
[h1]PROS: [/h1]
➕Awesome animation
➕Creative game world
[h1]NEUTRALS: [/h1]
🔹”Point and click” genre with controller recommended by the game?
[h1]CONS: [/h1]
➖Some of the puzzles/clues are hit-or-miss
➖Frustrating difficulty imbalance: overly difficult puzzles/overly easy environmental-object interaction
➖Unfulfilling narrative
[h1] [b] Content (Game world/Narrative) – [7/10] [/b] [/h1]
The game world is exceptionally creative. The entire premise of the game has children's imagination as the setting, so you end up visiting some absolutely bonkers places that pretty much make no sense whatsoever. Occasionally you get glimpses of the real world and the imagination world and I found it very creative in what objects transfer over. Like garden frogs (gnomes) have their own entire world that keeps recurring.
The narrative…isn’t so great. If you’re looking for a cohesive well-written story with a good message, you won’t find anything of the sort here. The story is just as jumbled as what a 5 year old might tell you about their day at the playground. But that’s intentional for what the game is going for. This is a story about children having fun with their imagination and the jumbled mess of a narrative stays true to that.
[h1][b] Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) – [4/10] [/b] [/h1]
The most polarized section for me is mechanics. As a point-and-click game, the “Environmental” puzzles are great, fun, and funny. These are when your character is walking around the screen, collecting items and using them on parts of the world. A typical point-and-click gameplay style.
The problem for me comes when you shift away from the environmental puzzles and over to the dedicated puzzle screens. I’d say only a couple of these dedicated puzzles I found fun or even tolerable, but the majority of these puzzles are just obscenely difficult. Much more than what I would expect a potential younger player to be able to do. I kept getting constantly frustrated and almost skipped the crab game after 30+ minutes of failure.
There is a hint option, but it sticks with the game's theme of communicating the most minimal possible, so the hint ability can nearly be ignored.
[h1] [b] Graphics (Quality/Technical) – [9/10] [/b] [/h1]
Absurdly beautiful. Exceptionally well done. Potentially the best part of Lost in Play is how amazing the graphics and animations look. It's like I’m playing a cartoon.
I experienced no technical issues. I do have to say that the game only has two graphical options - resolution and post processing, but neither are available to choose from the main menu, only inside the game. So it was quite annoying when it defaults to 4k resolution and uses both my monitors and I have to wait until I’m inside the game to correct it.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD
[h1] [b] Audio – [7/10] [/b] [/h1]
Good. The music is good, sound effects are good and funny (lots of fart jokes lulz).
There is voice acting but it's all gibberish, kind of like The Sims or Charlie Brown’s teacher.
[h1] [b] Replay Factor (Longevity) – [2/10] [/b] [/h1]
Not great. It's completely linear with no deviation and nothing to do outside the short 5 hour story. Only achievements.
[h1] [b] Final Verdict – [5/10] [/b] [/h1]
Lost in Play (LiP) is true to its name as you play a young brother and a sister engrossed in their own world of imagination as they traverse across a variety of different adventures, each more creative, unique, and crazy than the last.
My biggest negative, by far, has to be the frustrating puzzles. As mentioned above, the environmental point-and-click puzzles are fine, it's the dedicated screen puzzles that were annoying. The crab and laser puzzles almost made me quit, but I forced myself to keep going. The thing is when you have a game with no real point to its story or gameplay other than to have fun, and you stop having fun, then what is the point of the game? LiP doesn’t have a good story. It doesn’t have a hook other than the adventure you are on and when that adventure becomes more frustrating than fun, it's tough to want to continue.
For my positives, the artwork and graphical presentation is gorgeous. Everything looks so crisp and beautifully created. The closest animated game I’ve played with this level of fidelity is South Park, and while that stayed true to the show, LiP looks even better. Add in a super creative game world and you’ve got a whimsical adventure that is very pleasing to admire.
Lost in Play is tough for me to recommend due to the frustrations I experienced with the puzzles and the lack of a coherent story. The gameplay and story are the only thing that matters to me in a point-and-click style adventure game and LiP suffers in both of these areas. In the end, I will decide to recommend it because while the narrative and mechanics can be a letdown, I still found the humor and creativity of the game to be good.
Due to my disappointments and the short length of about ~5 hours, I strongly recommend waiting for a sale.
[h1] [b] Recommend? [Y/N] [/b] [/h1]
[h1]Yes[/h1]
You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR
