Lost: Via Domus

When you think of movie-to-game conversions, bastardizations of Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Die Hard franchise come to mind. Although this TV series-to-game conversion does really well as far as presentation is concerned, under all the eye candy lies an extremely bland and boring experience.

Most of you who watched the television series are probably wondering where the story fits into the grand scheme of things. Well, quite simply, it doesn’t. The story of Via Domus is somewhat of an alternate storyline with a few of the same characters from the series – such as John, Charlie, Sawyer, Michael and everyone’s beloved Hurley. You play the role of a press photographer, who's (like in every other adventure game) lost his memory. You uncover things about your past as you move along, and in the process find out a few more things about the island.

The game is divided into seven episodes which play out similar to the TV series – every episode ends with the Lost logo, followed by a painfully unnecessary recap of what you’ve done over the last few minutes, which marks the beginning of the next episode. I can understand that that they’ve tried to keep the game as true to the series as possible and make it feel like you’re playing a TV show; but this feature just comes in the way of the gameplay and slows the (already snail-like) pace of the game to a grinding halt.

As if that wasn’t painful enough, you encounter circuit puzzles throughout the game that require you to fit different ‘fuses’ into circuits to change the voltage of current flow to a specific number. It may sound a little daunting, but they’re simple as hell. The problem with them, however, is that they feel like they’re been shoved into the game just for the heck of adding a little flavor to the blandness. The result is that you’ll find yourself scouring the surroundings looking for fuses more often than you’d like to.