Lost Horizon PC Adventure Game

[Fiach]

I kinda came across this game by accident, I was browsing through Steam and saw the demo, had a read of the description, read a few reviews, played a bit of the demo and bought the game. I actually bought a game for its gfx! This game is astounding looking, now by that I dont mean its like crysis or anything like that, its an adventure game (point n click), the artwork on the backgrounds is just astounding, its the first time I have used the word sumptuous to describe game gfx!

Oh, I bought it on gamers gate for about 14 euro/20 yankee dollah!  >:D

The game is very reminiscent of Indiana Jones and Uncharted : Among Thieves, Its set mid 1930's, it starts off in tibet, moves to China, then on to Tibet in search of .... well something...

I have only played a couple of chapters and its pretty much a joy to play, take everything you hated about point n Click adventures, put them in a box and post them to your mother in law, you wont need them here.

Press the SPACEBAR and it highlights all interactable objects in a room, puzzles are pretty ingenious, but solveable even with trial and error, even action scenes, where you are eg. being dragged on the road upon a trucks tailgate held by a rope to the truck and chased by a car with homicidal triad gangmembers are a puzzle of sorts.

You dont need to navigate too many areas, most navigation is done via cutscene, so no more using your WSAD to try and move the character around the screen, solve a puzzle, then watch a great cinematic for plot exposition and move on.

Find more here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Horizon_(video_game)

[Art Blade]

Interesting concept, cutscenes to navigate. :)

[fragger]

Sounds like a cool game Fiach, going by your rundown and the Wiki article. My curiosity was piqued when I reached the comment in Wiki about the Piri Reis map. That anomalous ancient artifact has always intrigued me no end ????

Nice pick-up mate :-X

[Fiach]

Interesting concept, cutscenes to navigate. :)

Its an annoyance thats hard to explain Art, if you have played eg Broken Sword 3, you have to use Arrow Keys to navigate around an area and WSAD keys to interact with different items and its very clunky, or in Longest Journey, you use the mouse and click where you want to go, but its not readily apparent where you can actually go.

LH is a clunk free experience :)

Fragger mate, I have never heard of that, so its a new experience to me :). The company have made a couple of other highly rated games, you may find their plot interesting too :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Files:_Tunguska

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Files_2:_Puritas_Cordis

[Art Blade]

"clunk free experience,"  ^+-+ hehe, alright Fiach mate. Cheers  :-()

[Fiach]

Well I just finished this game and it was a bloody great experience, it had a really good ending too.

It was so good I actually went and bought two other games *mentioned above, Tunguska and its sequel and cant wait to get stuck into them, but first I have the Broken Sword Templars Directors Cut and its sequels to play, they will be a laugh :).

All in all a great story and very well told.

There is a nice touch at the end, where you access some bonus stuff and while its not alot, its pretty cool, there is a jigsaw puzzle to assemble, as a teaser picture for the next game in the Tunguska series, you can also play the prototype of the game, the original first chapter that was used as a tech demo, to sell the game, it bears very little connection to the storyline, but its interesting as a concept, also there is a fight scene at the end, that you can replay in a number of different ways to see different conclusions to the fight.

As with many adventure games, the puzzles will make or break your experience and I had to consult walkthrough's a few times and when seeing the solution, it was "logical" up to a point, the kind of logic you will find in a kids comic, where the most silly of things, when combined, will make something something approximating an item of worth, which in real life would be worthless, kinda like winding a rubber band around a pen several times to make a propeller, its not really going to w%&k, but the idea is there, same with some of the puzzles here, you cant look at them and analyse them like an adult and make a logical conclusion, you will have to just scour the maps, then look at what you have collected and combine things that seem to have an air of plausibility.

Im not knocking the puzzles, the game does its best to help you with some really cool mechanics, letting you know visually if what you are trying to combine isnt going to w%&k, its a staple of the genre, anyone remember the feckin duck in The Longest Journey?

But I found it intriguing to see what the solutions were eventually and had a giggle at their child like innocence.

If you like adventure games, get this game, you are sure to enjoy it, it looks great and plays beautifully, a real gem of a game :)

[Art Blade]

Thanks for the essay, mate :)

I don't remember the fecking duck (lol) probably because I haven't played The Longest Journey but for some reason your descriptions remind me of Indiana Jones, Monkey Island.  ???? :)

[Fiach]

Yes mate you hit the nail on the head with Indy and Monkey Is.

The "feckin duck" is part of a puzzle in TLJ, where you have to use a deflated duck to solve something really stupid. :)

What was great about LH, is that it opened up a whole new genre of game to me, while I have played Adventure games before, it was kinda grudgingly, with little respect or a sense of fun, the puzzles seemed like a chore and the games were very laid back, no run and gun levels.

I appreciate them now, maybe cos I'm more mature and appreciate the "laid back" style :)

Most FPS are boring to me now and I wasnt a great fan anyway to begin with, RPG's would be my greatest love, but now they are all nearly a "corridor" experience, invariably set in a medieval europe, even though they pretend they are in some exotic fantasy world. Japanese RPG's which used to be exotic are now handing their development over to western games companies and losing the flavour that made JRPG's exotic and special in the first place.

Its great now that I have become so jaded with games in general, that this old (but new to me) genre has come along and reignited my love of games. They are humerous, whimsical, intelligent and usually have a really great story to tell.

Erm... kinda went on one there didn't I :)

[Art Blade]

yes  :-D Nothing to worry about, though  ;)

I was just thinking, maybe you'd like to give "Day Of The Tentacle" another go. :)

[Fiach]

Doubt it would play on Win7, I think you need some sort of emulator for it, maybe it will get a HD remake like the Monkey Is. games.

I have got quite a formidable list of Adventure games from Shops, Gamersgate, Steam and GOG.com, due to some great sales they have been having recently, so I have plenty to keep me going until that HD remake is released :)

[Art Blade]

cool.  :) :-X

[fragger]

Interesting comments and viewpoint there, Fiach :-X LH sounds like great fun, I might give that a go. Thanks for the report :)

Sometimes I wonder if there are any new genres of games yet to be created, as opposed to just variations of existing ones. The Portal games for instance were original in terms of premise but merely semi-original in that they built on the existing FPS concept - essentially FPS games with puzzle solving in place of actual shooting. Occasionally something like Half-Life or Far Cry 2 comes along to lift the bar a little on what's possible FPS-wise, but it's still a perpetuation of the FPS concept. Same goes for other genres, they're all either derivative or built on established premises, or both. Platform jumpers a la Mario Brothers are still being made, and many adventure games utilize the same "pick up everything you can because you'll probably need it later for some reason" approach. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking that sort of thing - it can be a great brain exercise forcing you to use your imagination, and that ain't a bad thing at all. I'm reminded me of a puzzle in one of the Gabriel Knight games, where you had to:

Peel a piece of double-sided tape that you find stuck on the back wall of the wardrobe in your hotel room;

Go out and steal a water sprayer from the window sill of a house when the guy who was using it to water his pot plants turns his back;

Go down to the end of a particular laneway where there was a black cat sitting on top of a wall, opposite a garage door with a small hole in it at ground level;

Stick the double-sided tape inside the top of the hole;

Use the water sprayer to startle the cat and make it jump down, run across the lane and squeeze through the hole in the garage door;

Peel off the tape, now covered in black cat fur, to use as a false mustache to disguise yourself as part of a plan to solve an even larger puzzle.

Solving the puzzle required you to find the tape, find the right window and get the sprayer at the right time, find the right laneway and notice the hole in the garage door, find the cat, and put all those things together, knowing that you had to come up with a false mustache from somewhere. The game was full of things like that, requiring a good deal of lateral thinking, which makes for a better mental exercise than just running around and blasting anything that moves. I never did finish that game - I got hopelessly stuck somewhere, probably because I'd missed picking up some seemingly trivial but necessary object, or just failed to put two and two together.

But there must still be game concepts that haven't been thought of yet. I have no idea what, but surely all avenues of possibility for computer gaming haven't been exhausted already.

[Fiach]

Yes it can be frustrating playing a PnC game and you hit a brick wall, I remember GK3, where you had to eavesdrop on a conversation in a museum, but it only happened if you triggered it with proximity behind a picture or something.

I think its a very unfair genre sometimes, easily more than 50% of puzzles in the genre are complete BS. I have no qualms about hitting a walkthrough for a solution because of this.

I remember Curse the eye of Isis being released and the devs posted a walkthrough on the release day because they knew the puzzles were totally random and complete BS. I think this kind of crap is what initially turned me against the genre, maybe age adds a certain sense of forgivness, I play them but acknowledge they are fundamentally flawed to begin with. :)

[Art Blade]

 :-D

There once was a completely different new concept in a game called Creatures  which based on artificial intelligent life, done by breeding a set of Norn eggs, conditioning the Norns (slap=don't do that, stroke=keep doing that) and propagating (as in interbreeding to get the best of two promising gene pools). The game was shipped along with a 3,5" disk (erm, not a hard disk but the sequel of floppy disks) which contained 8 "eggs" that were unique and irreplaceable (load an egg from disk to your computer and it gets erased on the 3,5" disk so it virtually gets transferred and may be lost forever).

Basically you were busy educating Norns by watching over them all the time so you could intervene and slap them silly if they did something you didn't want them to do or try to stroke them to encourage repetition of a certain behaviour. What you (and they) did manifested itself in genes that could be crossed with other Norns so you could basically breed a bully or a wimp or just a nice girl/guy. You had intelligent and stupid variations and well, interbreeding two stupid Norns.. we're not going to call those "promising candidates for the presidency," are we?  :-()

I remember a couple of things: It was a chore after the first enthusiasm. It was sad when I watched my first self-made (bred) promising lovely intelligent female die because she wouldn't eat. It was making me angry to watch a bully (there was a Grendel, too, from a different species, who were evil) threatening and frightening sweet and tender Norns who were so intimidated they stopped doing what I taught them (the bully had more success in "teaching them a lesson" than me). It was a chore to prevent the curious naive Norns, particularly the sweet ones, to go to the Grendel trying to be nice and in return get retaliated or simply catching a disease off of the Grendel which made them die eventually. It was a chore knowing that you indeed could screw the simulation and have Norns die and finally run out of eggs, ending with extinction. I never finished the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_%28artificial_life_program%29

[Fiach]

Man that sounds like a horrible game Art, I would find those things pretty upsetting tbh :(

It reminds me a little of Black and White, where you had a creature (mine was an ape) and you slapped it to teach it stuff, like when/where to crap, I only played it for a short while, it just wasnt fun to slap the creature, kinda went against my ethics (the few I do have :)).

[fragger]

I don't think either of those games would appeal to me either, though reading about Black and White on Wiki reminded me of an old game called Populous which I quite enjoyed. Actually it was Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods that I got into. The background story was that you were one of Zeus' misbegotten demigodlings (apparently the old man had a penchant for coming to Earth in various guises and knocking up mortal women) and, not being content to spend eternity among the humans, you'd announced your claim to take your rightful place with the other deities in the pantheon on Mt. Olympus. Zeus wasn't about to just let you waltz in, however. You had to prove your worthiness by getting through the trials - in other words, playing the game. It was actually a real-time strategy game of sorts, where you had to build up a population of worshipful little people whilst trying to wipe out your opponent's population (and of course, your opponent would be trying to do the same to you). To that end you could unleash all sorts of godly woe on your enemy's population - storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, lightning bolts, rains of fire, etc. The more people you could amass (by getting them to "settle" and thus spawn even more people) the greater your godly abilities became, through prayer power, presumably. This would give you access to more and more destructive powers, and whenever you unleashed a power, your store of divine energy would drop accordingly, requiring you to build it back up again. This gave you the option of hitting your enemy often with lesser powers like Whirlwinds, or building up your power for one big wallop like Earthquake. You could also encourage your people to simply pick fights with the other players' to help keep them at bay. There was a lot more you could do besides just these things, providing a diverse range of tactics and strategies. It was loads of fun, richly animated, had heaps of character and was one of the most appealing and addictive games I think I've ever played. There was a sequel some years later but I didn't like it at all - whoever created it managed to somehow take all the fun out of the original concept.

I kind of miss Pop II in fact, it was a unique game.

Getting back to Lost Horizon for a moment, I looked at downloading it but it's nearly 4GB in size (does that sound about right, Fiach?) I did notice that it's available through Amazon.com, so that may be the way I'd have to go. A 4 gig download would severely impact my DL allocation and take an age with my crappy connection speed - probably quicker to have it shipped from overseas :-()

[Fiach]

I have uninstalled it mate, but 4gig sounds about right. I bought it from gamersgate.com where it sells for 20 yankee dollah, so in euros that was about 13/14 euros, steam was 20 euros iirc.

I have a 20 mb connection I think my allowance is about 500 gig over a certain period, so I can d/l with more ease I guess than you.

Hope you enjoy it if you do get it :)

[fragger]

Cheers mate :)