Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Coktel
Year: 1993
Platform: DOS

Rating: 5

Notorious for its copious–and I mean copious–inventory puzzles, Lost in Time tells a convoluted time travel story that falls short of the heights it aspires to. But it’s still a good time if you’re willing to have a walkthrough at the ready.

Doralice Prunelier awakes on the floor of a sailing ship and quickly discovers the year is 1840. Played in first-person perspective with node-based movement, you must steadily work with what you have on hand to help her travel to other parts of the ship to find others and learn why you’ve traveled back in time. Interaction with other humans is few and far between, and Doralice rarely learns anything about her predicament until she does. What’s in between is the mother of all puzzlefests where only MacGyver himself would feel at home.

In just the first section of the game, you must figure out what to do with a nail, some pliers, a lamp, oil, a sponge, and a corkscrew. And there’s about eighty-four more inventory items to go as you guess and check what everything does and where it goes. Like many adventure games, you will find yourself picking things up without any reason to do so. And unless you have a degree in chemistry or engineering, you will find yourself blindly guessing as to how your sundry materials and acrid chemicals go together to jury-rig another item that you just might use later!

While that does sound obnoxious, it’s not as annoying as it could have been. It helps that the inventory system is slick. Given that you’ll need to “try everything on everything” (including combining inventory items), being able to do so very quickly is a necessity. The game also often hints that you’re on the right track if you try an inventory item that doesn’t quite work. Unfortunately, the explanations as to why something doesn’t work seem contrived, and there’s not near enough hints to guide you to the solution. For example, at one point you need to siphon acid from a battery. While it’s plausible you can pick up from context that doing so would be the solution, knowing how to do so is impossible without knowing exactly what the battery looks like. A full-motion video sequence shows you the battery only after you solve the puzzle, and given that I’ve never in my life seen a battery that looks like that, I didn’t stand a chance.

Speaking of full-motion video, the marketing emphasized that this was the first adventure game to sport this new technology. The clips are generally no longer than five seconds or so and are heavily digitized, but it adds to the satisfaction of solving a mechanical puzzle when you can see the actor implementing your idea. My favorite part of the game is a flashback to a manor (which Doralice inherited) in modern-day France. It’s shot on location, so every scene is digitized and the videos are seamless. And it feels like you’re genuinely investigating a mystery.

The other areas of the game (including the ship) are hand-painted, and frankly kind of ugly. As a result there are fewer videos in these sections, and the ones that do exist are so clearly shot in front of green screen that it takes you out of the moment and it begins to feel more like a cartoon.

The sound and music vary between the floppy and CD-ROM versions. The CD-ROM version has higher FPS, so the videos are much smoother. There is also voice acting for some scenes, but the script (localized from French) is hacky and the acting (with no professional voice actors) is laughably poor. The music is an odd duck. The CD-ROM version has crisper music, but is more light-hearted and often doesn’t fit the mood. The floppy version, conversely, adds to the tension with greater use of the organ.

I haven’t said much about the story because it’s overly complicated. The manual describes it much better than the game does, but essentially you learn that a dude is being chased by the time travel police for messing with the timeline for personal gain and for some reason uses the slave trade to help hide his track. I never quite grasped what was happening, despite endless exposition in the endgame.

Speaking of the endgame, it is brutal and almost ruins the good will the game had built. While many of the game’s puzzles are obtuse, they all feel at least somewhat organic. The last several sections here feel like one big deus ex machina, with characters just giving you random items for literally no reason that happen to be exactly what you need. It’s a bummer, too, because there are a couple of neat timed puzzles mixed in. And the final puzzle is disappointingly easy, antithetical to the spirit of the rest of the game. I will add you can lock yourself out of victory a few different times, but only for brief periods, so if you save often you’ll be fine.

If you love inventory puzzles and don’t mind the occasional pixel-hunting and moon logic, Lost in Time offers up enough to be a worthy play. It’s not the hardest adventure game in this sense (that would still be Black Dahlia), but there’s plenty of satisfying moments when you crack the game’s logic. I first tried almost twenty years ago and found it intriguing enough to come back and finally finish it. I never would have won without a walkthrough at hand; the game offers you just three hints total during play. But I solved enough puzzles on my own that resorting to help felt more like a reward than a failure.