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Most games based on TV shows and movies tend to be pretty awful, especially in the gameplay department. Often these games will at least go to the trouble of attempting to provide decent fan service in lieu of decent gameplay, but they're not always successful. Lost: Via Domus is such a case.

The game attempts to insert itself into ABC's wildly popular and absurdly mysterious TV series as a sort of side-story that TV viewers don't get to experience. In practice, though, it plays like a cheap hack job, a desperate attempt to turn a show as functionally unplayable as "Lost" into a game for the sake of a licensing deal. Not only is the gameplay nonexistent and the storyline itself less than gripping, but "Lost" fans will be driven batty by all the bizarre inconsistencies with the show's long-running plot.

The game puts you in the sand-filled shoes of a never-before seen survivor of Oceanic flight 815. Your character wakes up amidst the chaos left in the aftermath of the pilot episode's plane crash, with the added bonus of amnesia. I won't spoil things by explaining who your character is or what he was doing on the plane -- suffice it to say your goal is to survive alongside your crashmates and figure out your fractured past.

You do this by wandering around the island a great deal, looking for clues and talking to survivors over and over again. In this way Via Domus is a lot like an old adventure game, albeit with nothing approaching the level of challenge you'd typically find in one of those classic titles. After all, this one's primarily for the casual audience.

Talking to the survivors is the thing you tend to find yourself doing the most, and it's also the most banal of activities. There are very specific lines of questioning provided for any conversation, and 90 percent of them are totally meaningless. You could probably ignore the vast bulk of the questions available, but every once in a while there's a nugget of vital information in there. As a result, it's generally best to just keep asking the same dumb questions again and again. It doesn't help that questions actually start repeating over time. I think I'd asked Locke if he believed in fate a good four or five times by the time the game was over, and his answer never did help much.

The rest of your time is spent wandering around the island, avoiding pitfalls and solving inane puzzles. The puzzles often revolve around organizing fuses on various electrical boards. These are similar to the pipe puzzles in BioShock, but without the time limit, thus making them incredibly easy if you can add and subtract to figure out the correct voltages. Occasionally, you're faced with some kind of grade-school pattern puzzle at one of those computer terminals scattered throughout all those creepy stations on the island. It's not that anyone would necessarily expect any serious brain teasers from a game so clearly targeted at a less-than-hardcore audience, but even still, this stuff borders on brain-dead.

There are also occasional photographic puzzles that tie into backstory-revealing flashbacks. You're presented with a torn up photograph of an old memory, and, inside the flashback itself, you have to take a snapshot that closely resembles the torn picture you saw before. Since the flashbacks will repeat until you get the shot, there's not much challenge here other than figuring out the focus and zoom for framing. Once you get your memory, you wander around picking up story clues and talk to someone, asking more insipid questions.