REVIEW : Lost in Play (PC)
Two imaginative younger brothers. A trip through oddities and mysteries, Goblins and Bears, Dragons and Chickens, Endless Deserts, and Dangerous Castles. In an interactive adventure with a cartoonish environment, the goal is to return home. Lost in Play was one of the most intriguing and odd titles exhibited at Summer Game Fest 2022, and after extensively playing it, we can confirm that it is an experience with an imaginative and fun soul, which will occupy you for a few hours at the sign of light-heartedness, but also of rationality.
Happy Juice Games’ offering for Switch and PC is a graphic adventure built on riddles and puzzles to complete to go through certain places. The artistic influence comes from Gravity Falls, a popular Disney Channel animated series, as well as the entire range of animated comedy, from Adventure Time to Rick and Morty (by the way, you have seen the new Rick & Morty poster ). In our assessment, you simply have to get sucked in, much like Toto and Gal travelling through parallel dimensions.
Toto and his younger sister Gal are two children with a lively mentality, as previously said. They were lost in their world, between games and toys, allowing fantasy to carry them away, experiencing wonderful imaginative journeys to the tune of fantasy. Between goblins and strange animals, the two brothers’ imagination reaches a climax when, unexpectedly, they find themselves locked in another realm, lost and far from home, but never truly deprived of the drive to investigate and experiment.
Toto and Gal resolve to start on a quest that would bring them back, but they must cross a real Middle-earth to do it. They will next have to survive in dark forests and escape voracious Grizzlies with the help of a tribe of toads, take flight from a wasteland by constructing a mechanical dragon out of junkyard bits, and pass Goblin towns before reaching their final act. the hallucinatory journey in which they will find themselves summarising this strange excursion There is no explicit or linear plot in Lost in Play: the visions and happenings that strike the unhappy characters, the absurd situations they find themselves in, the indecipherable poems, and the onomatopoeias that replace the dialogues speak for themselves.
It’s a plot that works and, above all, entertains, despite not inventing anything: in the nearly crazy comedy of Lost in Play, animation specialists will recognise Adult Swim’s varied and over-the-top style, despite the lack of content aimed at a mature audience. The adventure of Happy Juice Games is enjoyable exactly because of the purity and simplicity of the two tiny heroes and their supporting performers, who yet display a stinging and not at all frivolous irony.
Lost in the puzzles
Lost in Play quickly adopts the characters of a conventional point-and-click adventure. It is important to solve various problems by interacting with items and people, recovering elements required to advance in the next locations while impersonating one of the two brothers in turn.
Furthermore, as is customary for titles of this type, the player has a little inventory in which to store essential tools and then select them as needed. In this regard, the advancement was somewhat stratified, especially in the final phases of the adventure: we frequently found ourselves in a little agglomeration of maps, approachable merely by going towards the edge of the screen.
It is not uncommon to have to thoroughly investigate relatively vast regions, leaving some problems behind to overcome others and collect the necessary object, and then retrace your steps. Most of the time, we had to gather a variety of tools to offer to a figure who would assist us in escaping. To solve the riddles, however, it is sufficient to thoroughly explore the game locations, capturing all of the necessary information.
It should be mentioned that the adventure’s challenge level is not particularly high: the puzzles proved to be very simple, and Lost in Play falls far short of the most challenging and challenging point-and-click adventures. Some of them, on the other hand, have continued to urge us to sharpen our skills, particularly in certain aspects of the game.
Sometimes we find ourselves struggling with minigames designed to test the user’s logical skills: whether it’s playing checkers with a forest creature, engaging in an intense poker session with a group of inveterate Goblins, or completing a path using the motor of a handful of rubber ducks, Lost in Play has put us in front of the most intriguing interludes of the entire adventure, up to a rather crazy epilogue.
However, for those who want an easy existence, there is a command that provides specific clues to solving the current issue. This mechanic appeared to us to be useful at times and unneeded at others, depending on the circumstances. Although the suggestions have proven to be valuable and never too invasive during the most complex puzzles, most of the time taking advantage of this possibility has revealed the solution to the puzzle, which is why our advice is to use it as little as possible and let yourself be carried away by the creativity and inventiveness of Toto and Gal’s journey.
While not very imaginative or reflecting the apex of the genre, Lost in Play is a fulfilling and enjoyable adventure to witness, thanks to its outstanding artistic backdrop. We’re talking about a real interactive animation, hand-drawn and colourful, with strange characters and situations.
However, a tremendous production effort for the independent company, especially given key historical occasions when the staging gets more spectacular. In short, despite the case’s limitations, we can consider Lost in Play a successful bet given the title’s aesthetic spectrum.
