Lost in Play
Lost in Play does a lot of things right, but makes enough mistakes that I didn't finish it. It's a puzzle game based around two children who are (presumably) playing and imagining all the things in the game, rather than being whisked off to another dimension. This gives the game a lot freedom and variety in the set pieces and characters. The puzzles are generally fairly self contained, which is a breath of fresh air compared to some of the older ones where you carry objects around for hours. The art style and animations are beautiful, and the controls are great. Towards the end it starts to drop the ball as many of the puzzles I didn't think made any sense, even after looking up the answers.
Pros
- The animations and art style are beautiful
- Gameplay revolves around moving through self-contained puzzle areas that are usually 3-4 "rooms" each. All the items you need are used in those rooms, then lost when you move on - so there's no carrying something around for hours wondering what it's for
- Wide variety of puzzles to solve
- Nice sound effects
- Really creative environments to explore
Cons
- Puzzles are either too easy, or are very unclear in their goals. Usually the problem wasn't that I knew what to do but couldn't work out how - it was that I had no idea what I was supposed to do. On several puzzles, even with the hints giving you half the answer, I couldn't work out what the patterns were supposed to be
- In the later part of the game, there's a lot of just walking back and forth between areas to take an item from one place to another
- Several puzzles that take a long time to do have no skip option, and no hints
- It's about 4-5 hours long, so don't buy it at full price