The Mystery of a Lost Planet

Storyline: A five person space craft (the gamer being the fifth crew member) is pulled to a planet by some unexplained gravitional force and the excellent pilot manages to do a controlled crash landing where the ship does not break into pieces and everyone survives. Give that man a bonus! A huge bonus! Now time to do damage control, figure out what happened by exploring the surroundings and if possible get off the planet again. Gameplay: Runs in a linear fashion and once an area is completed it is "closed" off and can not be returned to. What is different about this game is there are two teams. Half way through the game when the first team finishes their objective the gamer switches to the second team. There is a point and click element to this game mostly in the gathering of inventory items to use for a specific task. Yes, screwdrivers and hammers are needed and can actually be found. And there are game comments concerning the use of other equally capable objects which basi...

It's a rare science fiction hidden object game. Well, this HOG is special because there aren't that many around that have a science fiction theme. The theme is well done: I like the artwork, the atmosphere, and even the plot is kinda nice. Where it all falls down is the puzzles. The HOGs suffer from the usual bad translation (calling a compass a "caliper" and a starfish a "sea star" etc.), and the puzzles suffer from bad logic (for example, in one scene you need to use the binoculars, on an area you can walk to, without any hint that you need to do this, and you can grab the objects you see through the binoculars, but only while you have the binoculars deployed). Also, the game crashed when it tried to load the outro, both on easy and on hard. There's no map travel. I played this because Artifex Mundi was asking about my favorite HOG genre, listing Science Fiction. It's mostly enjoyable if you can overlook its flaws, but you have to want to play a science fiction HOG and like it for ...

The Mystery of a Lost Planet is telling the tale of the crew of a spaceship that crashed on a mysterious planet, after being pulled down by a gravitational field. What will they discover? How will they go back to their homes? You're not a particular member of the crew, you're playing all of them without disctintion. For example, the doc is asking you to find crystals and flowers, however, when you're using the flashlight, it's himself that says he lost it. Same for the other team... Because, in reality, you're playing two teams; the first one exploring the forest and the other one an older ship that crashed and the surroundings. However, the gameplay is focused on list of items, as you have many of them throughout the adventure. There are some puzzles too, true to the description, that they're rare in the genre: attempt to guess a password for example. But I must say that without proper instructions, you're often wondering what you have to, even in casual. I had an hard time at the b...

[h1]Positives[/h1] [list] [*][b]Plot:[/b] I thought the plot and premise was quite good. I don't know why but I kept thinking of a game called The Dig whilst playing this, got a similar vibe for some reason. I'll comment later on in the review how this was let down in some ways but otherwise it's one of the more interesting hidden object games on Steam. [*][b]Aesthetics:[/b] Some locations look a bit too similar IMO but that doesn't stop the game looking pretty. The music was also quite atmospheric which is always nice in a HOG. The UI is okay but getting the inventory bar out of the way got a bit annoying sometimes ;) [*][b]Achievements:[/b] While some might see this as a negative it was a nice break to play a HOG without any punishing achievements! Depending on the difficulty level you play through, you can also get them all in one run which may appeal to some people :) [*][b]Value for money:[/b] I got just over 3 hours of play time out of this game and for once it wasn't one I'd lea...

This is the Dark Souls of HOG perfect for veterans who will hate the challenge at first then grow to enjoy the levels of mystery puzzle solving requiring skills on the level of Sherlock Holmes to get through. The game is very short providing a rewarding satisfaction from being able to solve the puzzles. All of the hallmarks of extreme difficulty are present, from objects hiding behind other objects, to tiny objects, to objects color matched to the background, their all here for the brave explorer willing to venture to the lost planet. The game is very short, even the "casual" or easiest difficulty doesnt make the game much easier so go with expert which still provides a hint button if stuck or lost. Half of the puzzle solving is figuring out what the puzzle is, what to do next, or even how to solve a puzzle. No instructions for puzzles, and many barely have hints to figure them out making even solving the puzzle itself a mystery, let alone finding them. Great cast and characters,...

Oh My God! Do Not Buy This Annoying Rubbish. There is no Spoken Audio. The HOP's are almost impossible to complete. The puzzles are Annoying rather than fun. One in particular involving some wires you have to follow to their source actually has the wires disappearing half way through the puzzle. Absolutely Horrendous.

Ok this game for me falls in the middle of a "maybe" recommendation. I only put positive due to it's very low price and Steam cards and achievements. The graphics are pretty meh, at least in my opinion, in comparison to some of the beautiful HOG's I've played from Artifex Mundi or Madhead Games. I also play on a wide screen so it makes it worse with a bit of a stretched look but truthfully for the price and achievements I decided to keep the game. If anything it passes an afternoon. * I have been corrected thanks to Vic! No ending bug. The "survivor of the wreck" only appears in Expert Mode. So if you don't play the game on expert difficulty you will miss out on 2 achievements in the end.

Decent art design and HO scenes, but the game fails to communicate with the player. Over the course of the game, this progressed from "not holding the player's hand" to "possibly a bad translation" to "purposefully obtuse" to "badly designed." If you REALLY want a hidden object game with a scifi setting, you might be willing to use the skip button and overlook things, but if you're here for a game...skip it.

An interesting concept and visuallly quite engaging, but boy is it a short game. I hope I did'nt pay too much for this as there were only an hour of play time and nothing too mentally strenuous.

This is a weak recommendation. If you like hidden object puzzles, that's most of what this game does. There are only a handful of other puzzles. It did run fine, including easily Alt-Tabbing out and re-opening (in Win 10). Also, it's pretty generous with hints and the like and getting all of the achievements is not too hard. It's a fairly short little game, though not much shorter than most other HOGs I've seen, but I think that fits the price tag (my time is inflated with some time minimized doing other things). There's quite a list of cons, though. The graphics are mediocre. The story is simple. The scenes and setting don't really try to make much coherent sense. Odd grammar (poor translation?) and misspellings are common, even in the HO scenes. Some of those objects in the HO scenes can be tricky, though I will say that while a few times I was a little frustrated finding something and thought there was a bug each time it just turned out to be harder to find than most items ...