Indie Game of the Week 183: Forever Lost (Episode 1)

Another week of Indies, another occasion where I rushed to fill a void left by a game that was in no way optimized for weaker systems. Sorry to keep banging that drum, but it's astonishing that most Indies aren't looking any better but continue to require more and more horsepower to run with a framerate in the double digits. Not that it's a problem for this week's game, Forever Lost: Episode 1, which debuted in 2012 and mostly utilizes pre-rendered graphics and static environments.

Forever Lost is the archetypal "escape room" game: you wake up in an unfamiliar location, the walls are covered with graffiti both instructive and incidental, there's puzzles and key items and red herrings in every corner, and even after you emancipate yourself from the immediate vicinity there's simply more locked doors and puzzles to find beyond. None of this is a bad thing, of course: I have a lot of fondness for escape rooms, and their popularity with us feverish puzzle-solving types is what led to a minor cottage industry of real-life examples popping up in many major population centers. Forever Lost has a dorky sense of humor that I appreciate too, even if it often runs counter to the game's sinister tone and ambience.

The first Forever Lost - there are three episodes in total which tell a contiguous story, though they were all released multiple years apart so I'm treating them like sequels rather than Telltale-style installments - has the player trapped in what appears to be a psychiatric hospital with multiple patient rooms, a nursery and waiting area for guests, and some administrative offices. Of particular note is the library, which is hinted at several times as offering the only means of escape via a bookshelf puzzle. To leave, however, you need to learn which nine books of the twenty-plus on the shelves need to be depressed, and that creates a sort of overarching puzzle to the episode. There's at least five smaller instances that each provide a piece to this final puzzle - usually one or two of the book titles - and so while the game begins to spread out into many directions you could pursue concurrently if you're presently stymied by one area's brainteasers, it ultimately requires you solve everything for the information you need (or you can gather most of the clues and try to brute force the rest, but I've never been a fan of that approach).

To Forever Lost's credit, there's some variety in its puzzle design, though for the most part they rely on gathering information found elsewhere. A simple, four-note musical puzzle for instance requires that you fix a nearby radio, which broadcasts the tune you need to recreate on a xylophone to open a nearby drawer. Because written hints - book titles, hieroglyphs, symbols, passwords, etc. - are so integral to Forever Lost's puzzles, the game came up with an ingenious way for the player to keep track without copious manual note-taking: a photography feature. You can simply take a picture of what looks like an important clue or code, and then recall it through the photo album if you think you've found the puzzle to which it pertains. The album can become a mite cumbersome to navigate if you're not regularly deleting clues you no longer need, but it's more convenient than writing down these hints yourself and less revealing than if the game simply records anything relevant in a separate journal feature. I'm not sure if future episodes will use the same mechanic, but it's smartly done so I hope it will be the case.

Forever Lost does have a few issues though, largely concerning its UI and navigation. Everything seems to have a delay to it: moving between screens, opening and closing the inventory, opening and closing the photo album, and activating hotspots. If you get impatient and try to click through multiple navigation prompts, the game simply ignores you so it can progress at its own languid pace. This, combined with no fast travel system (the game world is small enough that it might not need one, but you can still spend several minutes getting from one end to the other) makes the game move glacially at times. The clunkiness of having to wait for a moment to see if the game acknowledged the correct key press can really grind puzzle solving progression down to a crawl also. There are weird little errors too, like how you can write on top of a photograph to make additional notes or to follow an outline, and then when you come back to that photo the player-written notes have been shifted to the wrong places. One time I picked up the duplicate of an item I'd already found and used, and then used it in the same place again to no ill effect. It definitely leaves the impression of a neophyte production, but I imagine later episodes will be much more polished.

Forever Lost is too plain to be considered remarkable, and too buggy and sluggish to be considered exceptional, but it's not the worst first outing for a series of escape room-type games if that subgenre happens to be something you're into. The camera as a means of note-taking is inspired, and while I wished the majority of puzzles offered more than simply needing to regurgitate solutions I found on walls or in notebooks elsewhere, there were a handful that required some lateral thinking. Trusting the player knows the old trick about drawing over a paper pad to make an indent appear, or that they can solve a basic Pythagorean theorem problem, suggests the developers at least have some faith in the player's perspicacity, which I usually appreciate up to the point where I'm required to recall middle-school era knowledge I no longer have (musical keys is usually this for me, which is why I was glad this game's musical puzzle was so mercifully short). It's another case where a first outing was rough, but sufficiently sold me on the idea that the developers know what they're doing that I'm inclined to give its sequels a shot.

Rating: 3 out of 5.