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. Yay.

Not that the "action" portion of the game fares much better. You get a gun in Via Domus, and you use it a total of maybe three times over the course of the game. Maybe that's for the best, since the aiming controls are a bit suspect, but it's a little depressing that the most action you get out of the game involves a pair of chase sequences that last a couple of minutes each. In these, you're running at full speed, jumping over and ducking under obstacles as they come. Not exactly complex, but at least a bit reflex-oriented. The rest of the time you're playing hide-and-go-seek with either the mysterious black smoke monster that periodically shows up to terrorize the survivors, or the Others, who either chase you around or sit in treetop guard posts to pick you off from afar. Avoiding these threats isn't too tough, since there are hiding spots all around the jungle, but having to continually retreat to these hiding spots among the trees does tend to lead to a lot of disorientation.

While we're discussing the Others and their treetop guard posts, let me pose a question to fans of the show: Can you possibly tell me exactly at which point in the series the survivors ever had to hide from gun-toting Others in treetop guard posts scattered throughout the jungle? No? You can't? I wonder if that's because it never happened. This is just one of many goofy liberties the writers of the game took with the show's storylines and characters.

To a degree, the changes are understandable, since trying to make a game out of "Lost" is hardly an easy task. By the same token, if you're trying to insert your game into a series as detail-oriented and patently insane as "Lost," wouldn't it behoove you to not completely murder the existing canon? The game's climactic encounter actually had me screaming at my television because of how little it fit with what viewers have experienced watching the show every week.



Not to mention that the game's characters frequently diverge from their behaviors on the show. The Locke you meet here has way more in common with the severely unhinged Locke of the current season, even though the game ends before Season 3 even begins. Characters like Kate and Sawyer are relegated to annoying caricatures of their on-show selves, and even Hurley, who is known for his comic relief on TV, is just flat-out dull here.
Part of that is probably the fault of the voice actors. Not all of the cast is on-hand for the game, and the sound-alikes for characters like Locke and Sawyer are flat-out terrible. Even the actors who did bother to show up sound bored and disinterested. The writing certainly isn't top-flight, but the actors really sink this thing.

The only truly positive thing I can say about Lost: Via Domus is that it does a pretty good job of recreating the island itself. The visual engine creates some lush and beautifully lit jungle scenes, and you'll have the opportunity to explore all sorts of familiar locations, from the beach camp to the infamous hatch. There are even a couple of new areas you'll get to explore, at least one of which is sure to be a location of much interest for show fans. Then again, considering how out-of-line the whole game feels with the proper storyline, it's tough to say exactly how well any of these potential Easter eggs will really line up with the vision of the show's writers.

With marginal gameplay and a lousy plot, Via Domus really offers very little to the "Lost" enthusiast. The whole point of a game like this is supposed to be to provide a unique, never-before-seen angle to an already sprawling storyline, but considering that the producers of the show have come out in interviews and said that this game isn't canon within the "Lost" universe, what's the point? If the people who make the show don't even care about this thing, why should you? Fortunately, that's one "Lost"-related mystery with an easy answer.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.