Game Review: LOST Via Domus
Hey son, I'm over here, in the banyan trees.
Six hours. That was the minimum length. That was what they had finally made happen, at the cost of everything else.
Ubisoft Montreal lead developer Michel Foucault anxiously counted the seconds until the clients were bound to arrive. He reached under his jacket and fingered his gun—good, still there. There was a way out, if they, god, if they decided the game had to be ten hours long.
It was 2007. The television show LOST had just finished its third season to immense critical and monetary success, and had decided to strike the franchise iron while it was hot—from Verizon Wireless GRPS-exclusive online minisodes, to non-canonical internet ARGs, to, now, a triple-A production by video game giant Ubisoft.
It had already been a full month, and Michel’s team was all out of ideas, not that he let that stop them. How do you even make a LOST game? The plot amounted to a whole bunch of nonsensical mysteries being presented to the main characters, who are just trying to survive in a deserted island.
They had briefly tried out a resource management concept, with lots of farming, fishing, and boar hunting, but the early playtesters didn’t like the idea. They wanted more shooting, more action—was that what LOST was about? The show had more low stakes brawls and arguments than anything else, it was a mystery drama.
That’s what they told Michel, anyway, he’d never watched the show. He was a very serious AAA video game developer that preferred focusing on what he did best, saving money.
He could only hope ABC would like the final product. It was six hours long.
The door to the studio’s meeting room opened. Michel, the LOST: Via Domus team, and his own direct superior (who in truth had been paying far more attention to the Shaun White Snowboarding division) collectively swallowed as Ms. Gilman, head of the ABC extended media division, barged into the room with her posse of lawyers.
“I understand we’re all very busy people here,” she drawled, and it was even true—she had a 12 o’clock meeting with rap superstar Jay-Z, for a Legend of the Seeker-inspired album, ”so I’ve taken the liberty of bringing along a member of the target audience, so he may provide some feedback.”
It was a little boy. Michel guessed he was about twelve, judging from his gelled hair and his Spongebob-branded shirt with red flames coming from below, which was the style at the time. He definitely owned an XBOX 360, one of their target platforms.
Ms. Gilman tried to push the boy forward, presumably so he introduced himself, but instead he motionlessly stared at the first slide of the presentation—a sterile black-on-white text reading the original studio prompt, “LOST: the video game”. He could practically see stars in the boy’s eyes.
Michel shuddered. Maybe he wasn’t a fan of the series, maybe he just really liked video games—
“A LOST game? This is the best birthday present ever!”
Michel had to do something, and it certainly wasn’t delivering a high quality product. He reached inside his jacket, pulled out his gun and shot the kid in the face, multiple times.
He turned to what he now realized was the boy’s mother, Ms. Gilman, and said:
“Don’t be upset, that’s better than what we’re about to do to whoever actually plays this game.”
He advanced to slide two, which detailed the bartering system.
LOST: Via Domus is the worst game I’ve played in my life.
I swear to god, this is not hyperbole. I’ve played And Yet It Moves. I’ve played Crazy Bus. I’ve played Hiveswap: ACT 2. And this takes the cake.
In this review, I’m going to break down what not to do, and hope any developers can prevent this catastrophe from ever occurring again. First off, I’m going to be nice to the Ubisoft Montreal team and focus on the good parts.
The Good Parts
There is some fan-service. I’m a huge LOST fan, and it wasn’t enough for me to like the game. Here’s it, so you don’t have to play it.
The dialogue and storyline don’t directly break canon, and add some stuff that fits.
A few environments (the DHARMA stations) are really accurate to the show. There are even some cool details that you should just look up on the wiki instead of playing the game.
The music is taken from the show, so it’s pretty good.
That’s all.
The Bad Parts
The tech
To achieve 2022 widescreen resolutions, you need to enter the Windows Registry and manually edit certain parameters. I’m putting them here for insane people who feel the need to play this game. Do not do it.
The game is fullscreen only. If you alt-tab, you can randomly get your desktop stuck in the game’s internal resolution.
You’ll have to fiddle with further tabbing until your desktop resolution is restored and you can tab back in. Since the game takes control of your computer when you’re in fullscreen, you can only use the native screenshot feature. This means that to get enough screenshots to write a review I had to manually alt tab, paste screenshots, save them, then alt tab back to the game, and pray I wouldn’t have to wait a couple minutes to be able to return. It never worked, this game killed God.
The loading screens are endless and filled with pithy quotes. Every single environment change and flashback requires a ten seconds load even with a state-of-the-art SSD. I suspect the times are hardcoded in to artificially extend gameplay length, like Anonymous Agony did.
The graphics are pretty terrible.
Picking up objects is not based on distance, it’s based on what you’re aiming at, which leads to unexpected interactions that waste more of your time.
Honestly, at every point this plays like a fake video game you’d see in a crime TV show. I don’t think a single experienced developer worked on it, or at least none with a soul.
The storyline
You’d think that anyone who watched LOST would have learned that nobody wants to watch some nobody’s terrible crime-related flashbacks after the Nikki and Paulo episode.1
That’s essentially the backstory of the main character. He used to be a photographer with no morals who was investigating an awful criminal just to get on the front page, backstabbing the girl you see in the screenshot to do so.
This has nothing to do with LOST,2 but unfortunately it’s the story the writers settled on as the focus of the plot. The protagonist has no memories and has to slowly unlock it through flashbacks scattered across the plot, with terrible gameplay I’ll explain later.
The in-island plot is just forcing the protagonist through popular LOST setpieces and making him interact with the official characters, but with the worst excuses possible.
I’m going to summarize a slice of the plot for you, if you care:
The protagonist wakes up after the plane crash and immediately meets Kate. She wants to be alone. He saw her in the plane and knows she’s a criminal, but that’s all he can remember. He immediately backmails her, threatening to reveal her secret if she… doesn’t tell him where the beach is (???).
At the beach, he solves a terrible puzzle (more on this later) to stop the plane from exploding, getting congratulated by Jack and meeting Locke in the process. Locke mentions Elliott should just get a new identity, forget his old life. Up to this point, we’re still in episode 1x01. Randomly, he keeps seeing a woman’s ghostly apparition, like Jack did with his dad. This does not amount to anything by the end of the plot.
Immediate timeskip to the end of 1x02, with Jack, Kate and Charlie returning from a long trip into the jungle after an encounter with the Monster. Kate tells Elliott (our main character) that his luggage was probably deep in the jungle, in the broken-off cockpit of the plane, but Jack is now blocking the way to the cockpit because of Elliott’s own good.
Elliott notices the pregnant woman has fainted. His first thought is not helping her, it’s telling Jack that so he moves out of the way (???) and lets him go into the jungle.
After awful stealth sections (more on this later), some awful bartering (more on this later) and awful puzzle sections (more on this later), he gets his camera and laptop back. Around this point, he blackmails Locke the same way he did Kate (by threatening to reveal he used to be in a wheelchair and the island cured him).
When he gets back, the events of the plot have skipped to almost the end of the season, bypassing the caves subplot and with Locke already having unburied the hatch. Everyone hates him because a guy with no memories is suspicious or something, except Kate, which really has a good reason to distrust him!
Elliott needs a new battery for his laptop so he can get his memories back, so Locke sends him off on a nonsensical adventure through a cave, and almost kills him. He seriously acts like a villain that doesn’t give a shit if Elliott lives or dies, and blackmails him for a plot item (a compass) that he ends up giving back anyway.
PLEASE roll credits. Locke mentions Elliott should really find out his old name and identity. The plot doesn’t address this is the exact opposite of what he has been saying in the previous chapters.
When Elliott returns to the beach, the events have skipped to early season two (at this point, there have been two hours of gameplay, and only a single instance of the protagonist falling unconscious, he met the Others but it doesn’t matter oh my god), with the brand new beach camp instead of the fuselage.3
Elliott wants to enter the hatch because his magic compass is sending him there, and gives his laptop to Sayid so he can finish fixing it, but Sayid won’t let him in until he relearns his name.
He remembers his name from a new flashback, and Sayid lets him in. When he gets out, Sayid knocks him out because he unlocked his laptop and it had information about sarin gas :(
Elliott wakes up imprisoned in one of the hatch’s rooms. Kate lets him out after he says he’s a journalist and asks nicely.
Elliott goes to the Black Rock, so he can get dynamite to unlock a secret door into the hatch’s nuclear reactor, so he can disable the magic magnetism and find out where the compass really wants him to go—
I’m going to stop there. You get the gist, a series of excuses to put the main character next to popular characters (that he’s a dick to) and locations, as if there was a bullet point list of things fans wanted to do, and they did them in the laziest way possible. They even give them a camera, because the devs know that’s the highest level of engagement you’ll get as a LOST fan, “I was there, I took pictures”. They certainly could not write a good character plot like the ones in the earlier seasons, oh no.
But… who plays a LOST game so they can have their favorite characters distrust and kidnap them, and have your protagonist blackmail them in turn? Maybe a Kate fan would like it, but they do not exist! Why have terrible voice actors that poorly impersonate the cadences of the characters, instead of getting the main actors in the studio for a single day?
There are no more than fifty lines per character, logistically, it could have easily been done. The only issue would be the money, which obviously went to the producers instead of the budget.
The characters you interact with throughout the game are Jack, Kate, Locke, Hurley and Charlie, with rare appearances by Michael, Sawyer, Claire, Sun and a couple by Jin, Ben and Juliet. There are no other survivors, in fact the beach camp has at most three characters at any given time. This borders on false advertising, since the cover had Mr. Eko in it. Mr. Eko is not in the game.
When interacting with characters, you get some dialogue options.
But without fault, every single response is a single voiceline. There is no personality to any of it, no deeper interaction, it’s simply soulless and by the numbers.
You could have easily made this an openish world game where the protagonist actually is a blank slate, focusing on faithful representations of the island and its inhabitants, making friends with them, and so forth, something like a Telltale game, which would improve immersion and at least succeed on the fanservice front. But they chose the laziest option and became the worst of both worlds, a shitty game where everyone except Kate hates you.
At the end of the game, you betray Jack and Kate to the others, and only save them in the last second, but still fuck off the island alone. There’s a mindfuck ending where you’re suddenly back at episode one, but somehow your ex-girlfriend you got killed is still alive. The dickish protagonist did not deserve or earn this. It’s all so pointless.
I can’t forget to mention one thing. The defenders of this game, if they exist, would probably explain this away as fanservice, but I think it’s just another way to stretch the ““gameplay”” time further:
Every chapter of this game (seven chapters in total) has the same intro, outro, and “previously on” sections of the original show.
I’ve never seen anyone mention this. Yes, this means that after finishing a chapter, which never lasts over an hour, the next chapter begins with an unskippable cutscene with a “previously on” montage of moments you just personally experienced.
What the hell?
The gameplay
The main gameplay loop is walking around environments that remind you of the show, and talk to people. Sometimes you have to walk to new places and talk to people there.
One example. You need something from Locke, you get a prompt to remember a forgotten detail about him. You’re then transported to a flashback sequence where you painstakingly try to take a picture of it to “remember it” (so you can later blackmail him).
This is one of the key features of the game, using a camera to take the right picture.
This is the final photograph. You’ll notice Locke is barely even there,4 with the camera focus on random Elliott-related plot elements that you were not told about. This entire sequence took me longer than I'd like to admit, as I took pictures of Locke on his wheelchair from every conceivable angle, and eventually I just looked up what picture you’re supposed to actually take.
There are ten or so of these sequences. They’re janky, pointless and unfun.
But that’s not the only gameplay, oh no. There are a few other “minigames” throughout.
One of these is the bartering system. You pick up random coconuts and water bottles from the environment, and trade them for key items. As you can see, you can get torches, and there are also gun clips for sale later.
I beat the game having shot a grand total of five bullets. A single clip5 has around ten bullets, and there are plenty of clips you can trade for or pick up throughout the game for free.
Similarly, you can use a lantern and gas instead of these torches, but they have the exact same interactions with the two dark environments you’ll have to enter throughout the game (that’s another small minigame on itself, you have to turn off the light when bats attack you, and before going under waterfalls, otherwise the torch runs out faster, that’s it, that’s the gameplay). You can really get past both with two or three torches, and the entire feature is a pointless afterthought, a time waster.
You will be forced, for this section only, to have enough money to get two of them. At every other point in the game you’ll be swimming in items and will be able to get anything you want, not that there’s anything worth getting.
Wait, you can also trade for fuses, a key resource for the puzzles in the game. Wait, resources for a puzzle, you ask?
The classic immersive sim “pipe game” is here too, don’t worry. The difference is that you have to find the fuses or barter for them before you can place them. You can even take them from previous puzzles once those are completed.
By bartering, you’ll have enough fuses for every single minigame after an hour of gameplay, and never have to worry about that aspect again. Another baffling design decision.
There are a few action sequences, which I can describe in full here.
First are the smoke monster sequences.
You run through a labyrinthine jungle, using flags or landmarks (interactable objects really) that turn your camera towards the next landmark. They don’t go in a stray line.
You’ll have to avoid the smoke monster when he shows up, by running to a banyan tree and hiding inside. This is based off a single scene in the show where I’m pretty sure the black smoke didn’t even want to kill the characters anyway, I doubt a fucking tree can stop the physical form of the island antichrist, but oh well, I guess they wanted something for the players to do besides going from landmark A to B forever.
Once inside the banyan tree, you have to wait 20-30 seconds for it to go away. Rinse and repeat. During the final sequence, you can’t run because you’re holding dynamite, so imagine the same gameplay, but stretched ten times longer, and with more trial and error. It took me around thirty minutes, and it’s considered the hardest part of the game by the five people who finished it.
There are also a couple timed “quick event” levels, where your character runs, jumps (with the triangle button?) and slides (with the cross button??). The first level is merciless. If you trip a single time, you won’t make it. There’s one at the end of the game which you’d expect to be harder, but there’s plenty of room for error, I fell like five times. I really have no clue what the playtesters (if they existed) told the developers to make the final level easier than the first one.
But I have to mention the single worst instance of “gameplay”. This one is story related.
At one point, you get a prompt to draw your gun before you open a door. Behind it is the main villain, someone you photographed committing a crime and chased you to the island.
The natural instinct here, since you’re literally told what to do, is to open the door and shoot the guy as fast as possible. However, when you open the door, you get shot half a second later.
I died about five times tried my best to get a shot out before the other guy got me. The worst part is that there’s a small hole in the wall that you could totally shoot him through, but your gun is disabled when you approach the hole. Eventually, I gave up and googled the solution.
Conclusion
It’s shit.
-4815162342/10. Do not play this even if you’re a LOST fan.
If you haven’t watched LOST, the writers had gotten tired of writing the same characters by season 3, so they “promoted” a couple of nameless survivors into side characters, giving them a few lines across the first half of season 3.
They were so universally disliked by watchers that their proper introduction episode ended with their getting buried alive.
There is a single namedrop to the Hanso Foundation, which was part of the aforementioned LOST Alternate Reality Game, but it amounts to nothing.
In the show there’s a big exile from the crash location due to a seasonal tide rise, but really because it was expensive to keep a plane’s fuselage on a public beach for so long. The cast moves to a different beach where they build their own little huts, and it’s where most of the story takes place until Season 4.
Locke says “Don’t tell me what I can’t do” to the pawn shop owner. Again. Sigh.
I don’t care what the right word is.